


The Mandated

by stayseated



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Being a woman, Drogo and Grey are BFFs, F/M, Gen, Missy's Thirst, Prostitution, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2019-12-06 22:57:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 72
Words: 273,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18226538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stayseated/pseuds/stayseated
Summary: After suffering a terrible 'accident,' Grey goes back to work because he is fine. Everyone is fine! It's all fine! (Spy/Secret Agent Mod AU)





	1. Grey and Theon get hurt and then abandoned

**Author's Note:**

> I know I should be working on Grounded and/or Day 13, but instead, I wrote this instead. ARGH!!!

 

 

When they realize the shit has hit the fan — the team leads have been abducted in a raid and four of their members are already dead — what was supposed to be a one day engagement gets stretched out across five tense days. Dany takes tiny micro naps on the tiny couch in her office for those five days, nearly going catatonic from the stress and sleep deprivation. Tyrion’s breath goes stale, from cold coffee and repetitive sighing. Yara’s clipped voice makes check in on the ground, like clockwork — they all know that she is especially worried. And Missandei’s traitorous mind wonders if this is going to be the first blight on her record, if this is going to be the thing that prevents her from being cleared to go in the field — a shaky foundation in judgement, they might call it.

Missy wonders who would be the ones to contact family members — Yara already knows — but who would be the ones to contact Grey’s next of kin. Would it be Dany?

She pulls up his file because she actually doesn’t know his family situation. She pulls up his school records, his childhood health immunization records — she learns he had perfect attendance and he also got measles when he was ten years old. He moved to King’s Landing for school at age 16. He was recruited his third year of college. He studied literature during undergrad in King’s Landing. And then he earned his master’s in criminal justice. His parents are both still alive, both school teachers in the Summer Isles. He has one sibling, an older brother.

So, these are the next of kin that will be notified if he is dead.

 

 

  
Once Drogo gets the official go-ahead from Dany’s disembodied voice in his earpiece, he signals an affirmative to Daario, Robb, and Sandor, who nod imperceptibly and whose gazes hit the closed door of a dilapidated, abandoned butcher’s shop in the northeast corner of the city of Lys. This is the second site.

Drogo readjusts his hold on his gun. Yara is also on the line, waiting, as they break the lock and push through.

As they enter the shop in formation, securing the front room where sales used to take place years ago — then moving to the back storage room — the smell hits Drogo’s nose first — fresh actually. Bright. Clean blood.

He’s the first to see Grey’s body. Then Theon’s. Then Bolton’s. They are all soaked in blood.

Into his comms, as his team rushes in, Drogo says, “Securing the back. We’ve got them. We need medical care right now. Status unknown.”

Robb is kneeling down on one knee, gently checking Theon’s pulse.

 

 

  
Initially, they are faintly alive. Blood loss and the trauma results in them being hospitalized and kept unconscious for additional long days. In that time Dany argues with the powers that be and urges them to let her notify Grey’s next of kin — his parents. Leadership will not budge though, stating that it is not protocol and they do not want to set a precedence. Dany’s argument that the Greyjoys already know something has happened to their son does not hold much water. The Greyjoy are connected to the work. The Torgos, in contrast, are just normal people with no security clearance.

Drogo personally supervised the transfer of their guys, from Lys to King’s Landing. He darkly mutters that it is racial and it is bullshit.

Dany tells him it’s not racial — trying to nip his shit in the bud. She tells him it’s protocol.

He says, “So it’s protocol to let him die without his family even knowing when or why or how because they are not rich and they are foreigners.”

Theon’s dad never visits him though. However, Yara, sits by his bedside for hours each day. She has taken a leave of absence from work for the time being.

And because there is no one to look after Grey because no one knows this has happened to him, they all take turns in between shifts or on their days off. Drogo reads him Penthouse letters out loud, even though everyone hates it — even though Grey would really, really hate it if Grey were awake. Daario takes inspiration from this and brings a romance novel to read to Grey. He leaves the book behind for Tyrion, Kojja, and the rest. Missandei just sits in silence next to him — because she doesn’t think this is particularly funny at all — and she generally just cries sometimes.

Ramsay Bolton dies in custody on the fifth day, with armed guards at his door. His body gives out. The damage was extensive, stab wounds that hit vital organs. They tried to save him so that he could stand trial. When Bolton dies, Drogo drives his fist through a wall and wonders out loud if it was all for fucking nothing then — if the loss their team members have suffered was just for fucking nothing then.

Protocol dictates that he, Daario, Robb, and Sandor visit and get cleared by the psych evaluator. It’s all a crock of shit. They all say the expected things. They all get approved to go back to work soon after.

Grey is first to stabilize, then also first to wake up. When he does, he’s drugged up and disoriented. He sees Daario’s face. He tries to talk but there’s a tube down his throat. No matter, because when Daario sees Grey’s eyes flutter open, he is shouting loudly to the nurses and ringing the call button.

 

 

  
Missandei apologizes to the both of them separately. She tells them both she knows this is not ideal, but she has to take down their statements now that they are conscious again.

Theon has been hit far harder by what transpired. Theon cannot even focus or talk for very long. He spends most of his days just staring out the far-away window, at patches of light. Missandei patiently says, “Theon?”

And he says nothing in response to her.

Grey, on the other hand, wants _her_ to tell _him_ what the fuck happened since he has been unconscious. She hesitates, unsure of what he can handle.

In her hesitation, he sighs in frustration. And then he starts talking. He says, “We were ambushed, and I shouldn’t have let it happen,” even though it is clear to everyone that what happened was not at all his fault. He tells her that they were drugged and then moved. He tells her about what it was like when he woke up again. He succinctly tells her about actions that amount to basically just torture. He tells her he was pretty sure he and Theon were dead around day four. And then probably before they passed out from blood loss, Bolton mutilated them.

She blurts out, “So you remember.”

In a plain voice, he says, “Yeah.”

She says, “I’m so sorry, Grey.”

He ignores her mean-nothing statement. Instead, he says, “Is everyone else dead?” He means — did anyone else from his team make it out alive?

She shakes her head, finding tears pricking the backs of her eyes again. She means that everyone else died. He and Theon are the only ones left from their team.

He sighs. And then he says, “I dislocated my thumb to get it out of the bindings. I grabbed his knife and drove it into his stomach, on the right side —”

 

 

  
He gets a hefty payout from insurance, for his accident. It’s a weird thing to call what happened to him an accident, because it was really the deliberate actions of a fucking psychopath, but accident is the term that they are using. They are taking his lead on this, because “incident” is a term that just gets in his craw. There’s a part of him that just fucking wishes people would just call a spade a spade. He was paid a sum by his job because his dick was cut off. It is a hazard of his vocation.

He gets offered a lot of therapy and a lot of counseling. He says fuck you no thank you to that. He gets a lot of paid time off — paid leave, actually. When he asks them when he’s supposed to come back, they tell him not to worry about it. Take as much time as he needs.

He asks Dany, “Am I being fucking _let go_ right now? Are you _firing_ me?”

She shakes her head urgently. She says, “No! Of course not!”

She tells him that he should take the time he needs to heal and to recuperate. He doesn’t really think he’ll ever really get over getting his dick cut off — that is like, a life-changing thing. But also, he can’t sit at home and just fucking wallow in it. They cannot take away the one thing that he is good at and was trained _by them_ to fucking do. They can’t create the conditions for him to suffer this kind of “accident” and then suddenly turn their backs on him because he has suddenly become a liability to them.

Legal is tone-deaf. Leadership doesn’t understand that he is pleading for his life back. They are just really worried that he will make things hard for them. They insinuate that he should take his payout, and he should live out the rest of his life comfortably.

He says, “Where? If I don’t work, I don’t have a visa.”

His application to extend his visa due to extraordinary circumstances — another phrase he doesn’t really fucking agree with, but whatever — is denied. He is stunned. Drogo is stunned. Dany is stunned. Everyone is shocked.

Again, he asks if he is being fired.

Leadership tells him that he is not. He is just being put on an extended leave of absence.

He asks, “Indefinitely?”

They say, “No, not indefinitely. We just want you to take the time off that you need.”

 

 

  
So he decides to go home. Before leaving, he gets thrown a farewell party that also doubles as a “sorry you lost your dick” party of sorts. The second thing is never stated. Everyone is hysterically positive and trying not to trigger what they think is an impending mental breakdown. They bring in a really big cake. They don’t know his favorite flavor and he refused to tell them. So they got him a red velvet cake, which is actually a cake that he hates — and he tells them so, right before the big speeches.

Dany tells them all that he is the most wonderful person — the bravest and the most honorable. She recounts the story of them meeting — of his reputation preceding him, and of him actually impressing beyond his reputation. She tears up as she tells them that there is no one else like him.

Selmy tells them all about what Grey was like when Grey was 18 years old and a new recruit. Selmy makes jokes about how Grey was in the middle of reading poetry in the university’s quad — on the grass by himself — when Selmy walked up to him and told him that they have been watching him for years now. It really scared the shit out of him at the time — the idea that these white old men were just . . . watching him . . . for years. He was just a kid at the time.

Drogo tells them all that Grey is his best friend — which is actually completely news to Grey because they never like, hang out or anything outside of work. And actually, before his fucking dick got cut off, Drogo was actually a complete asshole to him because he’s not big like Drogo, he’s not muscular like Drogo is, and he isn’t as experienced in the same way that Drogo is. Drogo went up through the ranks. Was military before he joined. Up until Grey’s dick got cut off, Drogo seemed to resent him for not paying his dues in the traditional ways.

Drogo says, “I’m going to fucking miss you so much, man,” as he holds up a glass of beer in salute.

Grey looks around at his colleagues — at the rest of the personel. Their office is underground. There’s no natural light. Everyone looks bleak under fluorescent light. They are smiling maniacally at him.

He says, “I’ll be back before you know it.”

And they all seem like they are refraining from sighing at him, because he is so pitiful.

 

 

  
His parents do not have the clearance, so he cannot tell them what happened at all. They can only surmise that something terrible happened to their son because the person that they are getting back is not at all the person that left.

His mom cries about it more than he does. He actually can’t cry at all. It seems like his mom spends hours and hours clutching his face, staring tearfully into his eyes, sobbing, and screaming out what they have done to her beautiful baby boy.

He cannot say anything to console his mom — not that he doesn’t _try._ He does. He keeps saying to her, “Mom, I’m _okay,”_ but every time he says this, she just descends further into pain.

His dad also gets weepy, all the times that he thinks Grey is not looking. Over dinner, over breakfast, over lunch, over the short walks in a nearby greenbelt, his parents keep obsessively revisiting the past and blaming themselves for what has happened to him. They keep crying and telling him that they pushed him too hard with school and with achievement. They didn’t let him be a kid, and they didn’t let him have a life. They were stupid and they thought that he was going to have a bright future. They were stupid and thought that he was a genius whose gifts had to be nurtured and fostered. They only thought this because they are teachers and they thought they knew what gifted looked like. They thought it was the right thing to send him to college overseas. They thought he’d have the best education in Westeros. They were elated when he called them to tell them he was studying literature. They talked amongst themselves and told each other that their son was going to be an artist and he was going to be a writer. They thought he was going to meet someone and fall in love. They thought he’d eventually settle down. They also thought he’d have children and they’d have grandchildren. That was their plan for him.

In the Summer Tongue, his mom keeps asking, _what have they done to you?_

 

  
Because of the payout, he no longer needs to work for money. After four months, he realizes that everyone is a fucking liar and a fucking coward. His messages are not being returned at all. People have forgotten him completely. He needs to move the fuck on and just live a stupid, pointless, ordinary life. He has an advanced degree that is completely fucking useless at home. He doesn’t want to fucking do anything else, other than what he used to do.

So to spite everyone — and to spite himself — he becomes a clerk at a grocery store. He slums it way below his capabilities. He runs a cash register. He gets verbally abused by old women who snap at him when he warns them against writing checks. He gets verbally abused by old men, when he takes too long in grabbing booze and cigarettes for them. He gets crumpled money thrown at him by twerpy teenagers. He rings up boxes of condoms late at night, as he looks into the face of some horny bastard who is about to go get some. Grey repeats to himself that that part of his life is over. His fucking life is just fucking over, actually. He should just fucking kill himself already because it is all pointless.

 

 

  
They both used to be D and G. That was other people’s shorthand for them. It used to be confusing actually, because sometimes they didn’t know if people were referring to Grey and Daario or Grey and Drogo.

But now, Drogo and Daario are called the “Double Ds” and as much as they both love boobs, they both fucking hate this fucking nickname.

But really, they just miss Grey.

“You never know how used to working with someone you get, not until they are gone. I wonder what he’s doing right now,” Daario says, orienting his words into his food tray. It’s food from their shit cafeteria. It’s weepy apple pie, a soggy chicken salad sandwich, and a mealy apple. He doesn’t understand why the food is _so wet._

“Probably living his best life,” Tyrion deadpans. “No, just kidding. I stalk his brother’s girlfriend’s social media. And I stalk all of his cousins. There’s been three photos of Grey since he moved back home. One was wearing a nameday hat for a child and he looked miserable. He was smiling in the picture, but I know his eyes and joy was dying. The other pictures were just group photos. Joy was dying in them for him, too. His family is huge.”

“That’s so weird,” Robb says. “I thought he was an orphan for the longest time.”

“Because he never talked about his family,” Drogo supplies.

“Yeah.”

“How is Theon doing?” Sandor asks.

Robb frowns.

 

 

His parents set him up on a date with the daughter of one of their many friends. He doesn’t see the point in this because he can’t like, have sex ever again, so what is even the point in getting to know a woman at all? — his mother looks really alarmed when he casually says this — but he still goes along with it, just so his parents don’t start crying hysterically again. He is really tired of that.

Her name is Tiani, and she is really boring and nice. She wears glasses that are hipster. She is nerdy. She is insecure about her body even though she has a nice body. He can see it in the way she dresses, the way she slouches, and also the way she talks. He can also tell that she has totally been primed on his castration. Because she is super fucking awkward from _the get._

They have dinner at a seafood restaurant. His dad gave him money for this date, even though he’s like, kind of well-off now. He imagines this was a selling point for Tiani and her parents. No dick, but guess what? Rich and will not rape.

They make excruciating small talk at dinner. He cannot talk about the last ten years of his life whatsoever, because of security reasons. He has only become acutely aware of how much of his life was taken up by work. He has nothing to say about anything outside of work. Tiani asks about his hobbies. He tells her he used to like to work out — because he had to be fit for work. And that is it. That is the extent of his hobbies.

She tells him that she likes to knit. And she also likes to collect beach rocks. He refrains from pointing out to her that that’s not really a hobby. At least, not an active one.

He is so fucking bored. He thinks, for the millionth time, about just killing himself so that he can escape this fucking life.

He is shocked when, at the end of the night, she suggests they go out again.

 

 

  
When Yara finally comes back from extended leave, she looks haggard and tired. There are dark shadows under her eyes. She tells them that they have lost Theon forever. Her brother is gone. He died in that fucking room. And what is left is this depressed shell who is just emotionally scarred forever now.

Because she comes from money, she doesn’t think the payout was worth this at all. Her brother’s life has been ruined, and she doesn’t think people care enough about this at all.

“So, are you going to quit?” Missandei asks softly, wondering if Yara is going to stand on principle.

Yara says, “Oh God, no. I can’t quit.” She shakes her head. She says, “I’m just so fucking _pissed.”_

The entire conversation about the loss of Theon makes Missy wonder about Grey and how he is doing.

 

 

 

 

 


	2. Grey gets evaluated

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey's parents have to watch helplessly as their son fights to make his way back to a really, really abusive relationship. Also! Drogo, Sam, Missy, and Daario come for a visit! Missy doesn't know she's meeting her future in-laws yet!

 

 

 

His parents’ dryer is broken, and they are insane so they refuse to fix it and they refuse to let him buy them another one. This is how Grey finds himself cornered in the backyard as he’s hanging up his wet clothes.

In his accent, his dad says, “Son, I love you no matter what,” with such seriousness.

Grey is like, “I know,” as he throws a white t-shirt over the line.

His dad adds, “Chana’s son — he’s an investment banker. And Yonni’s boy — he’s a dancer.”

“Like, a classical dancer?”

“No, dancer at a club.”

Grey blinks. “Ah, okay. So where you going with this?”

His dad’s stare is unwavering. “When my friends ask me what my son does for a living, I used to proudly say he’s a government liaison who works overseas. I used to say he’s a good boy with an important job.”

 _“O-kay,”_ Grey says slowly.

“Now I don’t know what to say to people when they ask about you, Nudho. Because you’ve been lying to your mother and me.”

“Dad —”

His dad’s eyes flash at him. “Are you in drugs?”

“I think you mean, am I _on_ drugs. And the answer is no, not right now.”

It’s a joke. And in the past, his dad would be with it. However, today — and in the last few months — maybe for a few years now, his dad no longer finds Grey funny _at all._ His dad double-downs on sternness and says, “Are you trafficking drugs?”

Grey does another double-take, though he’s honestly not super shocked by this question because for days now, his parents’ comments have honestly been oriented in this direction. They have been wondering out loud a lot, how it is even possible for Grey to have suffered the kind of accident he suffered — _on the job._

Grey still says, “No, I’m not trafficking drugs.”

“Are you trafficking _people?”_

“Uh, no.”

“Are you a prostitute?”

Grey blinks again. “Wow. No. But that’s not a bad guess — but yeah, no. I’m not sure anyone would’ve wanted to like — _buy this.”_

“Nudho!” his dad snaps, just fucking _sick_ of Grey’s constant deflection and his constant hedging. “Why are you _lying?_ You never lied to us _before.”_

And his dad means before he left for King’s Landing. His dad means that before Grey was sent off to start his really auspicious life, he was an affable, cheerful, happy young man who loved his parents, who was patriotic, who loved his country, who promised to retain citizenship because he was going to come back one day and bring back all of his talents and all of his knowledge and all of these resources to build his homeland back up. His dad means that before his son left, his son was an _optimist._

“What kind of job — what kind of government job pays you _so much_ to travel and meet people?” his dad asks — at this point, more to himself than to Grey, because Grey never answers straight anymore. “What kind of job leaves you with —” His dad is gesturing to the front of his pants. “With this kind of injury?”

“Dad, I’m sorry but I just can’t tell you about my job —”

“You are lying!” his dad snaps. “All you know how to do now is _lie._ That’s what your fancy Western education has taught you? To lie to your parents?”

Grey pretty much despondently says nothing after that — because he can’t actually say anything. He can’t say anything because he fears that something terrible will happen to his parents if they know the truth about him. Either he will be reprimanded or they will be reprimanded and it will crush him. Or maybe they will learn the truth and he will lose all esteem in their eyes and his dad will find that _he_ was actually lying — just always fucking _lying._ And they will learn that his dad’s love for Grey is actually not unconditional and limitless. It has its limits.

And the truth is that a Western education _did_ teach him how to lie. It also taught him how to manipulate and how to efficiently kill at the altar of an unseeable greater good.

 

 

  
After about three dates, he figures out why Tiani wants to keep dating him. It’s because she’s gay, completely closeted, and he conveniently has no dick to accost anyone with anymore.

He confronts her about this about as nicely as he can confront someone about this — which immediately results in her staunch, panicked denial. He tells her to _relax._ He doesn’t fucking care, and he's not mad that she is dating him under false pretenses. He gets it. Parents just don't understand sometimes. He is actually fine with continuing to fake-date her if it will keep both of their parents off their fucking backs for a while.

She relaxes after that — by a lot. She actually starts to confide in him because she is hungry for a confidant and has made a lot of wrong assumptions about him. She tells him about how she’s so scared of losing her entire family if her ultra traditional parents know this thing about her. She tells him that she’s actually never been with another woman before — she’s been too scared of being found out. She just has had crushes. She also doesn’t think she has any gaydar and her biggest nightmare is that she will try to kiss a girl and that girl is like, ew, get off of me. She tells him she’s under-developed in this respect because she’s so freaked out. She talks like her life is over and this is the end of the world.

Little by little, he starts telling her it’s not that hard to be with a woman. It’s just like the friendly rapport that they have — except totally different. Except sometimes in between rapport, people will take their clothes off and try to get each other off.

This topic of conversation scares Tiani. She worries that he _is_ a sexual predator after all.

She is eight years younger than he is. He gets reminded that she is still very young every time she annoys him and every time she spends their entire “date” self-centeredly talking about herself and her insecurities and problems.

He thinks to himself that he shouldn't scare her with his matter-of-factness. He reminds himself this might be the first friend he has made outside of work in like, forever, and he can use someone like her in his life.

 

 

  
On his way back home after an engagement, Drogo capitalizes on a layover he purposely scheduled in the Summer Isles. He rents a car, puts on his sunglasses to block the red dust, and his foot is heavy on the gas as he bounces onto the main road that feeds the highway.

 

 

  
Grey’s mom reminds Drogo of his own mother, and this is partly why he’s so charmed and sweet on her.

He has to show Grey’s parents a photo of him and Grey together on his phone, to prove to Grey’s parents that they really _do_ know each other and are friends. Drogo is pleased as he observes that Grey’s parents are a little paranoid and cautious — just like their son.

Drogo says, “Yes, ma’am,” whenever Grey’s mom offers him something — usually food or beverage item. He also says, “Yes, ma’am,” when Grey’s mom offers to show Drogo the house that Grey grew up in. Drogo looks at all of the pictures on the wall — he sees at Grey as a little dweeb, with a missing front tooth, mugging for the camera.

When Drogo mentions that he and Grey also used to work together, the entire vibe changes.

Grey’s dad straight up asks Drogo why they were given back a son who is broken and maimed. Grey’s parents press Drogo for details. Like, they wonder how could such a thing _happen?_

Grey’s dad is angry. Grey’s dad believes that they are all lying to him — and this is actually true. He has been lied to a lot. Grey’s dad looks upon Drogo with bitterness, sizing Drogo up with his eyes. Grey’s dad actually asks, “If you were my son’s partner and friend, how could you let this happen to him?”

This is something Drogo and the rest of the team have been asking themselves, over and over again.

Out loud, Drogo says, “I’m sorry I can’t give you anymore details. But I can tell you that your son is a very good man. He’s one of the best I have known.”

 

 

  
Grey is still in his work uniform — this blue apron with the grocery store logo on it and a name tag that basically says: _Hi, my name is Nudho!_ — when he arrives home for dinner after his shift. It’s been nearly nine months since he left King’s Landing.

When he spots the rental car parked in front of his parents house, he kills his headlights right away and parks in front of the Kazzan house. He reaches under his seat and pulls out his gun. From weight alone, he knows it's loaded. When he first moved back, his mom almost found the other gun he stashed in his suitcase because she was trying to wash his underclothes. He ended up hurting her feelings by raising his voice at her to dissuade her from poking around in his shit. He ended up inspiring her to tell him she was sorry for invading his privacy.

He puts his gun in his waistband, under the cord of his apron. He pulls his light jacket over his shoulders. And then he steps in a muddy puddle and purposely walks into the house from the back door.

So he is mildly surprised when he sees Drogo’s thick body wedged on the couch, in between his mom and dad.

His first thought is, why the fuck are they sitting like that when there are like, three other chairs in the room?

He quickly realizes that it's because Drogo anticipated he'd enter the house like this. Drogo has positioned everyone facing him so that Grey can quickly see everyone is safe.

“Why did you come in from the back, Nudho?” his dad asks, his eyes narrowing.

“I need to hose off my shoe,” Grey lies, really effortlessly. “I stepped in dog shit.”

 

 

  
After dinner, after declining a third serving of food, Drogo follows Grey onto the back porch of his parents' house. There, Drogo tests the railing — it’s sturdy — before he flips around, leans against it, and pulls a cigarette and a lighter out of his pocket. He’s been trying to quit. For years.

As he lights up, he says, “Your folks are nice.”

Grey just says, “Yeah, they are.”

“I have to get going soon, but it was really good to see you.”

Grey says, “Was it?”

“Yeah,” Drogo says honestly, holding the glowing cigarette in between his teeth. “Because you should see Theon. Theon is just . . . destroyed. You are scarily well-adjusted.”

Grey just shrugs.

“You seeing a shrink here?”

“No.”

“Ah,” Drogo says. And then he clears his throat. “I suppose it’s hard to schedule in time with a shrink, what with your impressive new job and all.”

Grey rolls his eyes.

“It’s honestly painful for me to see you wearing that shit,” Drogo mutters, eyeing the apron. “It’s like, you get really comfortable with a partner — you have an established routine and a system down and a groove, you know? You have a lot of fun killing people together, and you’re good at it — and then one day, it’s all just _gone.”_

“Well, I’m sorry for your loss, man,” Grey says softly — sarcastically.

“Dany’s trying to get you back,” Drogo states flatly. “Been trying for months now. It’s just a bunch of bullshit red tape, and there’s the entire issue with getting you a work visa again and making sure you’re like, fucking _sane._ And it’s Dany, you know? She’s gonna make it happen eventually. So just — I’m saying. It wouldn’t hurt if you were to see a shrink. On paper. You know? Maybe join a support group. Show healing and shit.”

 

 

  
Grey brings a box of pastries to his first meeting at a room in the community center and finds that it’s a complete cliche. There are powder blue boxes of curried goat buns already on the table. Napkins are stacked next to boxes.

He introduces himself as his parents’ son, because the community already knows him from when he was a little boy. Gossip also spreads fast, so they also know about his injury. He himself knows half of the men here — distant friends and relations.

Uncle Matun — not actually related to him — is the defacto group lead. He introduces himself. He nods at Grey, with his eyes kind and soft. And then for Grey’s benefit, Matun starts talking about when he was first diagnosed with penile cancer, after years and years of feeling like something was wrong but not doing anything about it. Matun talks about how the strong denial was because of his upbringing.

Grey crams a goat bun into his face right before it’s his turn to talk — and he feels like he has to talk because he has to demonstrate his healing and he will probably need people to vouch for him if they end up doing a very thorough assessment of his mental health. So he telegraphs the appropriate signs of nervousness. He eats like he is nervous. He talks like he is nervous. He acts appropriately scared and unsure. He even kind of tears up a little bit, as he apologize for not being able to be detailed because of security reasons — but basically, what happened is that he suffered a terrible accident at work. And it has changed his whole life. He tells them that he has trouble sleeping. He sometimes feels phantom pains. He sometimes even experiences phantom erections. He tells them that, some days, he doesn’t feel like a man at all.

 

 

  
Missandei sweats through her blouse just minutes after getting off the plane. Dany specifically asked her to be the point person on this trip even though it’s pretty below her pay grade. Dany just wants to avoid looking too over-eager. Dany wants to not flag anything by showing up in person on a routine assessment. This is why Dany furtively sent her number one.

Daario grins at Missy and tells her that it is so fucking _hot_ here. He is also dipping below his pay grade. He’s here as a glorified bodyguard, just in case. They have spent the last year reworking their processes because of what happened with Grey and Theon. Daario is also here because he has the time and he just wants to see Grey.

Sam starts turning pink right away, under the blistering sun. Those stories he heard about the ocean breeze driving the heat away were a crock of shit. He mutters that he’s from the north. He is not great with sun.

“Doc,” Daario says, trailing behind them. “Did you remember to pack sunscreen?”

They visit Grey’s childhood home first. Missy and Darrio are well aware that Drogo visited Grey and did a casual, informal pre-assessment assessment, to see if they should risk booking a real assessment for him. Drogo came back with the all-clear. Drogo said that their boy looks really good — scarily good. Like, he might not be human because he looks like he’s doing so good.

Tarly is unaware of their behind-the-scenes machinations — how they have stacked the deck in Grey’s favor because they want him back so badly. If Tarly knew, well, they’d all get reprimanded really swiftly and Grey would really get fucked and left in purgatory, maybe indefinitely.

They all meet Grey’s parents for the very first time. Grey’s parents continue to be surprised at how shockingly _normal_ all of Grey’s former coworkers-who-might-be-drug-traffickers seem to be. They were shocked at how bright and friendly Drogo was. They are shocked at how charming and quick to laugh Daario is. They are shocked at how professional and sensitive Sam is. And they are shocked by how beautiful and wholesome Missandei looks. They tell her they didn’t realize that Grey had many female colleagues.

“Women are mostly in-office,” Missy explains to them. “There aren’t as many of us traveling in the field.”

 

 

  
The visit is a surprise to Grey because it has to be. They don’t want to give him time to prepare and to give the appearance of normalcy. This is why his jaw kind of drops when he sees the three of them walk into the grocery store that he works at. He is scanning a massive shopping cart full of frozen food when he spots them. He blinks and looks shaken — and he’s unmoving for a moment. He looks uncertain.

Sam doesn’t know Grey at all — that is the point. Sam is unbiased. And because Sam doesn’t know Grey at all, Sam does not realize that every move that Grey is making is completely deliberate. Drogo gave him warning. He’s been expecting them.

Sam has read his file though. Sam has pored over his profile. Sam already knows who Grey is and what Grey has done and what he has been capable of.

Sam gestures to Grey to keep going — to keep working. They will connect later. Sam chats with Grey’s coworkers, who all think he’s great.

 

 

  
“Wow!” Grey says, when he’s finally on break. He walks up to Daario right away to give him a dap that transitions into a warm hug. Grey says, “What the fuck, man! I didn’t know you guys were coming!” as Daario laughs and holds him tightly.

“Well, we’re actually here to work, not to visit,” Missandei says mildly.

“We’re here to hopefully help you get cleared to come back,” Daario says.

Grey also reaches out to Missandei. It’s the first time they have hugged or made any body contact ever. They have kept it very professional in the years that they have been colleagues. But now, he is grinning at her. He is saying, “Great to see you again, too! You look really nice!” as he curves his arm around her body and pulls her to him in a soft hug.

She smiles as best as she can, she also lets out this ridiculous laugh that is nervous and jittery. She pats him on the shoulder.

And then Grey lets her go. And then he gives his hand over to Sam to shake. He says, “Hey, good to meet you. I’m Grey. But you know that, of course.”

“Samwell Tarly.”

“So you’re my psych evaluator,” Grey says, sounding confidently casual.

 

 

  
No surprises get uncovered at all in the interviews. Grey’s parents are really worried about him in addition to being really angry at his former employer and confused about what kind of work their son even _does._ His dad especially does not want him to go back to work at all. His dad is pretty cool with Grey working at the grocery store — the kind of low pressure job that results in no one getting their fucking genitals cut off.

Daario secretly thinks that Grey’s dad is a riot.

Grey’s dad actually looks at the three of them — even beautiful Missandei — with barely contained anger at certain points. He accusingly says to them, “One day, I’m going to get a call, aren’t I? I’m going to get a call that my boy is dead. And you won’t even be able to tell me why.”

Sam frowns.

Grey looks distinctly uncomfortable. He softly says, “Dad, it’ll be okay.”

His dad snaps, “It’s _not_ okay!”

His mom looks brittle, but also strong. She answers Sam’s questions succinctly and also resentfully. She doesn’t want her son to be cleared to work again, either. But she is honest. She tells them that Grey keeps a regular schedule. He seems to sleep fine. He eats normally — like how she remembers him eating. He has not displayed any signs of anger. He does not lock himself in his room.

And without being prompted, she also says, “He also is not the same. He is not the same at all. Sometimes I look into his face and I see a complete stranger because of what _they_ have _done_ to _him.”_

Grey says, “Mom . . . I’m still me.” And he seems to be at a loss. He doesn’t know what else to say to her.

Sam talks to Grey’s brother who bewilderingly says the same — that Grey seems really healthy and steady — it’s actually this line of questioning that is making Grey’s family more and more concerned. They keep looking at Grey, like they are wondering if he _should be_ more traumatized than he appears.

Sam talks to Grey’s girlfriend — who tells them that she and Grey have not been intimate yet — and they probably won’t be intimate ever. She lowers her voice and confesses to them that actually, she is gay, and Grey is just a really, really great friend who is doing her a solid so that she can get a reprieve from her parents and so she can like, live her life in quiet for a while. She tells them that Grey is really caring and really supportive and just the best listener. She tells them that she and Grey have bonded a lot over like, what they have gone through.

Sam talks to the members of Grey’s support group who, with his permission, tells them that Grey has been just processing through a lot of trauma in group. The group tells them that Grey contends with issues of his manhood, of his identity, and of his future romantic prospects. The group members tell them that Grey is worried about his worthiness, the attractiveness of his body, and whether or not he will be loved. His friends then point out that Grey is young and has his entire life ahead of him. They point out that it took a lot of them so much more time to process their grief than Grey has. They say that Grey is amazing and inspirational — and they wish Grey the very best because that kid deserves it.

Missy and Daario see that Grey has primed all of the people in his life to tell the truth about him — without them even being aware that they were conditioned to do this.

Sam thinks that there is something strange going on here. It just all sounds too neat. He talks to Grey for more than three hours, going from childhood to adulthood. He discovers a man who is very intelligent, who had parents who loved and nurtured him and a community that believed in him — and he also discovers a man who is extremely, extremely repressed, but who appears open. Sam is actually looking for signs of psychopathy or a personality disorder, because there is something strange going on here.

 

 

  
In a lull during day two of interviews and shadowing Grey as he goes about his daily routine, as Sam continues chatting with Grey’s really concerned parents, Grey intertwines his hands behind his head, leans back against the overstuffed sofa in his parents’ living room, and he kills some time as the radio drones on in the background. He says to Missandei and Daario, “So, what’s new with you guys?”

“I bought that boat.”

“No way, man,” Grey says, grinning. “You were talking about that boat since forever! Have you caught any fish yet?”

“Not a one, man,” Daario says, laughing and slouching deeper in his chair.

“And you?” Grey says, directing his attention to Missandei. “What’s new with you, Missy?”

He never ever calls her Missy. He is doing so just in case Sam is eavesdropping.

“I’m doing more field work,” she says quietly.

“Oh, I know that was something you’ve always wanted,” Grey supplies. “Must be a dream come true.”

“Um, I doubt it,” Daario smoothly cuts in. He also lowers his voice. “Unless her dream really was to talk to perverts and lonely assholes while wearing next to nothing.”

“Oh,” Grey says. “Bummer.”

“We all start somewhere,” Missy offers.

 

 

  
So, Tarly does _not_ clear Grey to come back to work — and when Dany gets the report, she _flips out_ because she expected Grey to get cleared to come back to work. She expected this because when Missandei came back from the Summer Isles, Missandei said that everything looked great. He looked great. He said all of the right things. Everyone just vouched so hard for him and his healing. Like, he looked _great._

This was why Dany expected the all clear.

She actually confronts Tarly in his office. Dany has her arms cross and without preamble, says, “What the fuck did I just read?”

Sam sighs. And then Sam says, “I’m not sure he’s ready, Daenerys. We can’t put him back in the field before he’s ready —”

“He’s _ready.”_

“Dany, we can re-evaluate in a few months —”

_“Fuck you, Sam.”_

 

 

  
So Dany goes over Sam’s head. Dany tries to make a case for racial bias against Sam — something that doesn’t hold water, but something that manages to really damage the respect and trust that they have built up with each other over the years — and in the end, Dany gets Sam’s evaluation tossed on bullshit technicalities.

Sam is replaced by another psychologist, Margaery Tyrell, who has to go to the Summer Isles to duplicate Sam’s work with Daario and Missandei.

This time, the outcome of the evaluation pleases Dany. Margaery’s report states that Grey is really well-adjusted, and she is confident that he is ready to go back to work again.

In one last bid for his case, Sam says to Dany, “Don’t put him in the field right away. Put him at a desk. And make therapy a condition of his employment. Please. I know you care about him. I know you all really, really care about him. And that’s why I’m urging you — care about him by giving him the support he actually needs. He _thinks_ he needs to work. But he actually needs more time to heal.”

Dany glares at him.

 

 

  
When Grey learns that’s he’s finally being cleared — after more than a fucking _year_ — to come back just to be on fucking _desk duty_ — he fucking wants to kill himself and everyone around him. In a private conversation on their personal phones, on a secure line, Grey lowly mutters, “What the fuck, Daenerys? I thought you were going to take care of _this.”_

Dany says, “I did. You’re coming back. You should be grateful. Leadership thinks you’re a liability and shouldn’t be back ever. You don’t even know what I had to do to get you back.”

“Well, I’m _glad_ leadership put me in a situation with bad intel that resulted in my fucking dick getting cut off by a goddamn psychopathic murderer. I’m sorry I fucking saved Theon’s life as I fucking laid dying on the ground. I’m sorry you broke my mother’s fucking heart because none of us can tell her why I almost died. But yeah, I guess I’ll come back to fetch you fucking coffee and to take notes for you.”

 

 

  
He says goodbye to his parents, who turn their back on him. Physically. His mother actually shows him her spine as she sobs into his father's chest. His dad shuts his eyes. And his brother's hand is heavy on his shoulder. His brother has car keys jingling. Azzie says, "Come on, little man. Let's get you to the airport."

He has tried to tell them that he loves them. He loves them all so much. But he is nothing without the job. He feels dead and empty inside when he is not working. He feels like everything he has done and has sacrificed has to be worth something and it has to hold meaning and amount to something big — because otherwise what is even the point in living? What is even the point in being so far away from them even though he loves them so much?

 

 

  
He does a shit ton of nothing on his first day back. He just fills out paperwork and gets his ID badge and stupid shit like that. He just listens to HR drone on and on even though he knows they exist to make his life miserable, and it was just a year ago that he was intimating to them that they are fucking useless paper pushers.

He has to have mandatory therapy during work hours. At one p.m., he knocks on Tarly’s door. He sharply takes in a really deep breath. He cracks his neck. And after Tarly says, “Come on in,” Grey enters.

He says, “Hey! What’s up! Good to see you again.”

Holy shit, he needs to dial it back a few notches.

So Grey clears his throat. He says, “Okay, so I hear you think I’m insane or that I’m on the verge of an emotional breakdown. Can I just tell you — I don’t believe in shrinks.” And then he smiles.

Sam looks at Grey. And he thinks that this is probably the very first, truly honest thing Grey has ever said to him. Even then, it is benignly manipulative. It’s _supposed to be_ the first honest thing Grey is saying to him.

Sam says, “Why don’t you put down your things?”

 

 

 

 


	3. Missy is a bad fake-hooker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey does a power move in therapy because he hates therapy. On the other side of the building, the future love of his life is getting reamed by a bunch of men for being bad at her job. Then! There is some running with sexual tension, as Missy continues feeling judge and scrutinized by all the men in her life. Aw.

 

 

 

After Tarly leads him upstairs and also outside, Tarly pulls out a plastic baggie full of . . . bird seed . . . and cracks it open with a quiet snap. He digs his hand in for a few finger-fulls. Then he starts tossing the small grains to the pigeons loitering near a circular, man-made pond.

Everything about this campus feels retro — like they should be wearing corduroy and velour, like they should be wearing sweater vests. Grey imagines that the design of this campus was already outdated even when it was new.

And Tarly looks like the hero of his own story. The ever-suffering champion of the broken and the left-behinds. A magic healer. Grey’s very own Patch Adams.

Grey rubs his right ear with the flat of his palm, blinking against the sun as he says, “You about to Good Will Hunting me?”

Sam doesn’t even pause in feeding the birds. He just calmly says, “Pardon?”

“That’s what this is, isn’t it?” Grey says, gesturing to the pigeons. “You’re Robin Williams. I’m Matt Damon.” Then Grey gestures to his face, like hello, obviously he is Matt Damon.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sam says.

“Good Will Hunting, man,” Grey repeats. “It’s a movie.”

“I know,” Sam says mildly. “I’ve seen it. What about it?”  
  
“Matt Damon’s an asshole-genius from the wrong side of the tracks, a rabble-rouser who doesn’t know love but sure knows the shit out of math. And then there’s Robin Williams, the unconventional, quirky therapist who teaches Matt Damon to cry and to open his heart up.” Grey pauses. “Like, that doesn’t sound familiar?”

“I know the plot of the movie,” Sam says, still unnervingly calm and really bent on feeding his birds. “But it’s just a movie, Grey.” Sam then clears his throat. “The way you summarized that was interesting.”

“Was it?”

Sam nods. “Yeah. It really was.” And then, rather than expanding on that thought, Sam looks to the imagined horizon. He says, “I like being out here because it’s quiet and no one ever ventures out here. And I like birds — I like animals. I know I’m not supposed to feed them.”

 

 

  
They actually spend an entire half an hour slowly circling the pond, talking about movies. Sam discovers that Grey has a surprisingly deep rolodex of pop culture reference points, what Grey self-describes as a few years uncool and behind. He tells Sam that Western movies made their way to the Summer Isles late, so by the time he discovered Ninja Turtles, the Western world had already moved onto Power Rangers. He’s always a little out of touch compared to his Western counterparts.

He tells Sam that he likes movies because his dad really _loves_ movies. As Sam already knows, based on the hours Sam has spent with his family, his dad is a literature and writing teacher. His dad is really into stories and his dad always read him books or they watched films together. This is why Grey learned how to read at age three.

“You don’t think you just picked it up because you were a bit of a prodigy?” Sam asks.

Grey shrugs. He mutters, “I bet a lot of kids are prodigies, but they just don’t have parents who read them books.” Then he says, “Is this your version of play therapy then, but for an adult man with intimacy issues?”

“Stop trying to guess what I’m doing or not doing,” Sam admonishes. “Honestly, I’m just trying to build up some trust. I’m hoping we’ll eventually get to the point where you aren’t analyzing every question I ask and deliberating before every answer you give.”

The nice-guy, subtle accusation really rankles Grey’s nerves. Shrinks are fucking useless. The only purpose in having shrinks around is so their organization doesn’t get sued when some guy shoots his wife in the face for nagging too much, because he becomes an angry alcoholic.

So, after barely pausing a beat, Grey’s voice goes low. He doesn’t pause in his stride either. He just plainly says, “You want the truth? The truth is this is a complete waste of time. It’s offensive that no one believes that I am fine. It’s offensive people are always trying to tell me how I should _feel._ It’s bullshit that this narrative of victimhood is getting pushed on me. I just want to do my fucking _job._ So — what do I need to say to you so that you will fucking clear me to do my fucking _job?”_

 

 

  
Missandei kind of fucks up. She becomes a bit of a deer in the headlights when she aggressively gets leered at and is asked to show a little something-something — to show a tit, some nipple maybe. He calls it a hit — a taste — and her mind frantically fights to translate this lingo for a panicked second before she realizes that she is actually pretty _bad_ at speaking _criminal._ She is especially bad with using and understanding slang in a natural way  _because_ she knows so many languages and studied them like a nerd.

She is so thrown by the request to show her boob that she actually makes a protective move — she covers her breasts by crossing her arms over her chest.

And the minute gesture results in the target screaming, “She’s a cop! This fucking bitch is a _fucking cop!”_

And as everything and everyone else buzzes into hyper-alertness, as her pulse slams in her chest, as she stupidly and instinctively tries to allay everyone’s fears by screaming back, “I am _not_ a cop! I am not a cop! I swear!”

And then before the fever pitch breaks, before everything can erupt into violence or worse — Drogo’s team busts in and then extracts her swiftly. Robb’s hand is hard on her upper arm, pulling her and then tucking her into a car.

It happens so fast and she doesn’t learn about what happened to the target until later. Later, she learns that they unfortunately had to put him down because he drew a gun. Later, she is sitting despondently on a bench in a cold, concrete room with sticky dry sweat on her skin, as Alayaya pats and then prods Missandei’s bare shoulder. Alayaya laughingly says, “Everyone is pissed at you.”

Missy sinks her face into her salty, bitter hands. She doesn’t get why Yaya thinks this is somehow fucking funny at all. Missy’s voice is muffled, as she mutters, “I should’ve flashed him my boob. What was I thinking? Yelling that I wasn’t a cop?”

Yaya slams a locker open, pulling out a duffle bag. She says, “Well, hindsight is twenty-twenty, you know?” She slams the locker shut again, hikes the back over her shoulder, and then nudges Missandei again. She says, “Hang in there, doll. It’ll be second nature one day.”

 

 

  
She comes home these days very early in the morning, wearing baggy clothes, reeking of like, really cheap drugstore perfume. Her eyes must be haunted these days, because her dad gently rises from the guest bedroom, like he’s been waiting for her to come home, and he silently fetches her dinner — or breakfast. It’s food that he has cooked and has packed away in the fridge.

He heats up the plate in the microwave as he smiles at her and pretends that he doesn’t see what he is seeing. He whispers to her and asks her how her day was.

Missandei smiles tiredly. She softly says, “It was a good day. How was your day?”

“Very nice,” he says, warming his hand around a mug of tea. “I talked to your mother today.”

“Oh yeah?” Missandei asks, tilting her head to the side. “What did she say?”

Her dad’s smile turns sardonic and a little sneaky. He says, “She wants to know when you are going to settle down with a nice boy.”

Missy lightly scoffs. She says, “Of course she does,” as her gaze travels into the darkened living room, where she keeps a small altar with a plate of fruit and her mother’s photo over it. “That sounds like something she’d say.”

 

 

  
She’s back at work at nine in the morning, in time for her first meeting at ten. She dreads it — of course she dreads it — but she snaps the front of her blazer so it’s smooth and taut — and she tries to hold her head high as she walks into the conference room.

Daario is eating a powdered donut, after rifling around a box and touching every other donut before settling on a jelly-filled. He widely grins at her with his coffee cup held in the air. After getting one look at her face, he says, “Buck up, buttercup. You’ll be okay.”

She doesn’t even think that her face betrays that much emotion — and so she refutes his words. She says, “I’m fine. I’m completely fine. It ain’t no thing.”

“Oh, it’s most definitely a thing,” Drogo mutters, as he steps past the glass door. “Mornin’ darlin’,” he says to her as he makes a beeline to the donut box, before shaking his head and sighing.

The meeting starts right on the hour. The post-mortem is excruciatingly embarrassing and terrible. Barristan has read over Drogo’s report, so they gloss over details — they just jump right into what went wrong — so they just jump into this question that they have been going back and forth on for a while. Half of the people at the table do not think she is cut out for this kind of work at all.

Drogo is especially tired of indulging one woman’s delusions about her capabilities. He thinks he’s being really magnanimous when he says that Missandei is a fantastic analyst and she is a fantastic interpreter and she is an okay profiler. She is better suited to her previous job. One day, something terrible is going to happen — like what happened with Grey and Theon — and they are going to stumble across Missandei’s body in a puddle of her own blood — just because they _refuse_ to face the fucking facts. She is just not good at field work. She is a slow thinker. She is not great at adapting. She is not quick on her feet. She _looks_ like law enforcement trying to look like a hooker and not like, an _actual_ hooker.

Drogo says, “I’m not trying to be cruel, mama. I’m just stating facts.”

Daario is in her corner — sort of. It’s just that they came up together, so they have a friendly relationship and he’s had to listen to her spout off a bunch of cliches about her hopes and dreams and motivations a lot over the years.

To Barristan, he says, “Man, it’s just optics. It’s just small tweaks. It’s no big deal. We can get her hooker-ready, Selmy. Trust me.” Daario gives his case for letting her stay in the field by saying that she doesn’t really have to be good to do what she is doing. She just has to dress the part, sort of act the part, and just stand there looking vulnerable and beautiful. Like, Missandei can _master this,_ Daario is sure of this.

Daario says that they need a woman like Missandei. Yara looks so grizzled sometimes and is too busy. Brienne is like — duh, Brienne is out, and this isn’t what Brienne is good at. Kojja is too dark and too busy. Pia is great white supremacist bait, but she is just too busy with other work sometimes. And Alayaya was just promoted.

Daario says that Missandei is clean, her skin isn’t too dark, and she just has that look about her — that thing that just inspires men to want to like, abduct her and tie her up and leave her in a dark room.

Missy shuts her eyes. Because this is humiliating and not at all what she aspired to be when she was younger.

 

 

  
She spends the rest of her workday avoiding Drogo, because he is being an asshole to her at the moment, because he thinks that he can just neg her into obediently quitting and going back to what everyone else thinks she is good at.

She also avoids him because sometimes he is scary. She is scared Drogo will snidely say stuff about how they all have to indulge Missandei because Missandei is the boss’ BFF and fucking favoritism is going to kill them all.

She skips lunch and hits the gym instead. As she walks past the open door of the cafeteria in her workout clothes, she can hear the low drone of appreciation — of male whooping and hollering. She is guessing that people are really happy that Grey is back. For more than a year now, she has been listening a lot to stray comments here and there about how Grey is the greatest shit there ever was and how it’s such a fucking shame — what happened to him.

She runs into Brienne — sweating, pink, and breathing hard — at the gym, at the tail end of her workout. Brienne holds the ends of her white towel in her fists as she kindly says, “Hey, we all have bad days.”

Missy says, “Oh God, so you’ve heard, too.”

Brienne pulls a face, like she regrets saying something because she’s now scared that she’s going to have like, an entire conversation with Missandei about this. Brienne tries to kill any chance of conversation by saying, “Sort of. It’s not a big deal. Really. Okay, it was good to see you. I gotta run. Meetings. Bye!”

To the imagined puff of smoke that Brienne’s feet left, running out of there as fast as she did, Missy ruefully says, “Okay, talk to you later.”

She puts a quick five miles on the treadmill. She tries to blast music into her brain, so that she doesn’t think too hard about her failings and shortcomings. She actually goes a little meta and thinks that her problem is that she thinks too fucking much. Her problem is that she can’t quiet her traitorous mind enough to just be natural about _anything._

 

 

  
She’s about to restart her run again when Grey walks in. He’s dressed for the gym. So it must mean he’s about to work out.

She is watching him in a mirror and she’s about to whip her head around to say hello to him real quick when she sees him gesture to his ears.

It takes her a second to realize that he’s asking her to take out her ear buds.

When she does, he asks, “Why are you running like that?”

Panting, she says, “Like what?”

“Why are you _jogging?”_ he says, not clarifying at all.

And . . . Missy does not know how to answer this. Like, why not jog? She likes it. It’s just what she likes to do.

Finally, in between breaths, she haltingly says, “What should . . . I be doing . . . instead?”

“Not jogging,” he says blandly.

And then he goes to the fountain to fill up his water bottle. And then he generally just ignores her. And then she is like, what the fuck? Someone is in a fucking mood! And then she is like, realizing she is staring at him still. So then she plugs her earbuds back in, and just feels every excruciating bone in her body being scrutinized as her feet repetitively pounds against the treadmill.

Because of her shit day and the last couple of really shit months at work, she constantly feels like she has something to prove. She fucking _loves_ that her parents scrimped and saved to put her through school so that she can be fucking _bad_ at being a pretend hooker. She fucking _loves_  that her brothers are supposedly too busy to return some calls from her and their dad, as if being busy is a good reason for abandoning family. She is fucking _busy,_ too, but she manages to make time for the man. 

So it is meaningful to her and only her — when she increases the speed on the treadmill more than a few notches — she speeds up her run — and she just maintains and pushes herself to keep moving her feet so that Grey doesn’t get to feel like he scared her off with his weirdass commentary.

She also sneaks glances at his workout. It’s all weights. He moves without any hustle — not slow, but not particularly fast, either.

He’s done after only half an hour. And after he reracks weights, he swings his eyes right to hers, through the mirror. He’s smirking. He is signalling to her that he knows she was watching him like a creep. He gives her a short salute with a tilt of his head. And then he walks out of there. He crosses Yara on his way out, when Yara is on her way in. Yara grins widely at him and holds up her hand for a high-five, which he smacks his palm into. The sound is loud and stingy.

Missandei's pounding heart feels like it wants to give out, as she rapidly hits at a key on the treadmill, lowering the speed waaay back down. She yanks out her earbuds again.

Yara takes a big whiff, inhaling all the humid sweat and body odor lingering in the air. She's actually trying to smell a fart, so she can accuse Missandei of farting and embarrass the shit out of Missandei because Missandei is hilarious sometimes. Yara jokingly says, "It smells real sexy in here."

 

 

 

 


	4. Both Grey and Missy hate their current jobs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one except Drogo listens to Grey when he tells people he is fine. Drogo is sick and tired of Missy risking other people's lives by being terrible at her job. Missy is pissed at Drogo for being an asshole, and she shows her anger by generally hiding from him in fear. THEN! Missy kind of starts up the shortest conversation ever with the future love of her life! He's super distracted by his awful manager so he doesn't see that the future love of his life is like, sitting right there, waiting for his love!

 

 

  
Grey spends his first month back settling into his life — though he finds that nothing feels the same as it used to. He rents an apartment within walking distance to work, even though he actually cannot walk into work. It’s a secure campus, so he has to actually drive in — but he is kind of just comforted by the option. The campus is remote, so his apartment is in the middle of suburbia, just strip malls and a big chain store and people walking their dogs at night.

He sold all his shit when he moved back home with his folks. So his apartment is still pretty much empty, save for a mattress in the bedroom — a legit splurge because he loves sleep — and a couple of plastic lawn chairs in the living room. He bought two. Just in case he decides to bring a friend over one of these days.

See, this is why nothing feels the same as it used to — because before, he actually never even considered ever having a friend over. It wasn’t something that resonated in him — to care about. But Tarly keeps pointing out that he has zero real friends, and it’s starting to give him a bit of a complex.

Like, he defends himself. He says, “I have _friends.”_ He pontificates out loud and asks the room, which is made up of just him and Sam, what makes someone a friend?

He answers his own question and says friends are people who are your ride or dies, people you can have a laugh with, that know a lot about you and you about them. Grey is thinking that Daario is his friend. He knows Daario is Tyroshi and that Daario’s mother was a real boozer who kept getting them evicted from apartments because she couldn’t hold down a job since she was so drunk all the time. Like, why would Grey know this information if Daario wasn’t his friend?

Grey thinks that Drogo is definitely his friend. Yara is his friend. Brienne is his friend. Alayaya is his friend. Missandei is his friend. Tyrion is his friend. Hell, even cranky Sandor is his friend. He actually has a shit-ton of friends.

“I know you are very close with your colleagues,” Sam says soothingly, trying to smooth over Grey’s anxieties. “It’s wonderful that you’ve built so much trust and a good rapport with the people you work with.”

In Sam’s point of view, he actually never really gets on Grey’s case for his apparent lack of friends. Sam just asked a question and Grey just went a little nuts and got defensive about it.

Over the course of a month, for fun, Grey picks up on a bunch of things that Sam is insecure about — like his body, his apparent lack of cool, his emotional nature, and his pervasive empathy for others’ feelings — and Grey just takes all of these qualities and uses the knowledge to torture Sam. Because if he has to see a shrink, then Grey might as well just make it terrible for the both of them.

Like, Grey tells Sam that therapy will never work for Grey because Grey has been coerced into it. Grey’s agency and voice was stripped away because the people in power decreed it so. Grey was already fucking maimed and ruined because of this unrelenting, cold-hearted job — but he has to constantly deal with the indignity of being dehumanized further and treated like a child. He can’t make any decisions of substance anymore. He pushes paper now because this is now his worth. He was just a tool that was used and then discarded. He grew up watching the legacy of oppression press down on his parents — and they had such fucking hope for him. So it is really rich that he is being debased like this and he has to constantly perform and try and prove his health because why even fucking listen to the words he is saying when everyone has already made up their minds about him? Because white people just _know better always, don’t they?_

“Do you think I don’t take what happened to me seriously enough?” he asks Sam. “I thought I was going to fucking die, man. As I laid there bleeding out, I thought that it was the end for me. And my entire life has just _changed_ because of what happened to me.” He pauses, now shaking his head in disgust. “But I guess that is not enough. I guess you are not satisfied until you see me cower and cry over it. I guess none of you will believe me unless you see that I was broken because of this. I know that’s what you want from me, so that you can look at me pitifully and say, ‘Oh, you poor, tragic little asshole.’”

He is staring despondently into Sam’s face as he says these things.

 

 

  
Grey learns about the perils of a desk job and being middle management. Like, Grey spends hours each day putting up with Stannis’ constant chair and desk adjustments. Stannis is Grey’s manager and has a motorized desk that can transition from a sitting desk to a standing desk. Stannis likes to lecture on the dangers of slouching and bad posture.

Stannis likes to casually talk to Grey about workplace-related injuries — and for the first week, Grey is like — hey, is this guy a fucking asshole, or what?

But after the first week, he realizes that Stannis is not trying to be cruel-funny at all. Stannis is just one of those people who has no idea who Grey is and thus, has no idea about the accident Grey suffered last year. Stannis is neither creative, adaptable, or very empathetic and thus, he tends to assume that everyone views the world like he does. Stannis thinks that his new section mate and charge is just like him — has the same goals and desires, which is to work an honest job doing what is expected of him with unerring consistency, to put his daughter through school, to save for his and his wife’s retirement, until the age of 65, after which he can spend his twilight years tinkering around with his orchids and practicing the art of bonsai.

In his first month working for Stannis, Grey spots many areas in the workflow that can stand to be optimized for better efficiency. He wrote up a report and delivered it to his manager’s inbox, figuring that clarity in communication would be something Stannis would appreciate and value.

Stannis shuts down all of Grey’s ideas — every single one of them. And when pressed by Grey for _why_ they don’t just automate certain data entry tasks, Stannis merely says that computers can’t always be trusted.

Which makes Grey internally go, _what the fuck? Computers can definitely be trusted!_

Outwardly, he doesn’t want to stir up shit with his manager in his first month back. So he just generally explodes in silent rage, deep in his soul and stuff.

Grey keeps trying to get a meeting with leadership — and with Dany. He keeps emailing her just enough, but not too much that he actually starts annoying her and then pushes her too hard in the wrong direction. He just wants to know what the plan is for him. He doesn’t even need to be spearheading his own future at the organization. He just wants to know the approximate timeline of his progression back into the field. He wants to know how many therapy sessions he has to go through, what milestones or metrics he has to hit, and he wants to hear leadership acknowledge his wants. He does not want to retire at a desk job in middle management.

His emails and meeting requests go without response. He starts to feel like he’s been ghosted and ignored, forgotten on purpose. Some nights, he goes home at night and pulls off his tie and sits on his toilet to pee in the dark, and he just gets so fucking mad and wonders what is even the fucking point anymore.

“Watch for forward head posture,” Stannis calmly mentions to Grey, as he sips from his navy mug. “I see it — your chin.” Stannis gestures to Grey’s face, as if Grey doesn’t know where his fucking chin is. Stannis adds, “I strongly recommend you see a chiropractor. It changed my life. Our insurance covers it. There’s a copay with each session. Very reasonable.”

 

 

  
His wife is ready to leap right out of her skin when Sam arrives home. She is frazzled and makes a quick beeline for him before handing him the baby. She huffs out a sigh and she tells him that the baby has been calling out for his father all day.

Really, Sam knows that what this really means is that the baby has been crying a lot. He leans over, gives Gilly a kiss on the cheek, and he gently tells her to maybe go draw herself a bath and relax in the tub for a bit. He says this because she smells a little greasy.

As the water runs, Sam calls out to her from the kitchen to ask if Little Sam has eaten dinner yet. Upon getting no answer, Sam swipes a jar of baby food and tries to feed the baby anyway.

Afterward, after Little Sam’s face is all wiped up again, the two of them relax on the couch, half-dozing. Sam feels around for his child’s heartbeat, as he holds his child to his chest. His stomach rumbles, but he thinks that this rare moment of peace is worth it. He smells his baby’s head and presses his lips to the baby’s face. He goes over it all again — his work day — in his head, and later he will review his notes after Gilly and the baby are asleep.

 

 

  
Grey gets Theon’s number from Yara, who reluctantly hands it over after throwing him a few suspicious looks. She doesn’t want him to stir up old shit with her brother, even if accidentally or unintentionally, because her brother has been doing better. She doesn’t want old traumatic memories to set Theon back.

But there is also the possibility that Theon might also actually just want to see Grey again, so that’s why she hands it over.

Grey meets Theon in the morning, when it’s still a little foggy, damp, and overcast. It’s cut into his workday, but it does not even fucking matter if he dicks off because it takes him three hours to do his work, and then he just spends the rest of his day just fucking wanting to die under Stannis’ passive aggressive comments about how Grey wasn’t at his desk. So at the very least, coffee breaks up the monotony of _that._

Grey tries not to make it all about himself by opening up the lines of communication with a quick hug and a, “So, what’s new with you?”

Theon kind of laughs, with his hands momentarily squeezing Grey’s arms before letting go. It feels intimate, even though they weren’t really very close _before_ the accident. It feels friendly.

 

 

  
Drogo honestly cannot take much more of this. Missandei fucking sucks at her job, and she fucking needs to go. She has a stunning lack of awareness of her body. She always looks scared and bewildered. She stutters. She even fucking says words incorrectly sometimes because she is nervous — and words are supposed to be the _one thing_ she is good at.

He has diverted a lot of time — his own time and other people’s time — trying to train her for nearly a year now. He has been a gentle and supportive friendly supervisor, sitting her down and asking her what he can be doing to make her training better for her. And when that shit didn’t work, he has been the hardass boss who micromanages and erodes her self-esteem by correcting every perceived mistake that she makes and making the both of them go completely mental over this shit — and _still_ — she doesn’t fucking improve.

He has pleaded with her. He has asked her where she envisions herself in a year — realistically. Like, are they going to still be fucking _doing this_ in another fucking year?

She always looks so wounded and hurt. Her face makes him feel like a fucking monster. He feels like he has to be a monster, to drill it into her — that she is not fucking ever going to be cut out for this shit. Some people just aren’t. He doesn’t want her to fucking die out there. She is not good enough to keep herself alive. They are just running out this ticking bomb. He fucking cannot go onto another dark room and just hope against all hope that the people he cares about aren’t already dead. He just cannot do that again.

Sitting in Dany’s office, in front of her desk, Drogo is shaking his head. This is not the first time they have talked about this. This is probably their millionth time. Dany is decisive in all areas of work — except here. Here, Daenerys has been frustratingly soft and weak.

Drogo says, “I can’t do this anymore. She puts our people in danger every time she is out there.”

He then details a litany of incidents Missandei has choked on. He repeatedly points out that this isn’t even the fucking hard shit. This is basic shit. This is like, ‘stand there and look pretty’ shit. And she cannot even fucking _do that._

Dany looks tired. She’s been having a lot of these sorts of conversations lately. Drogo is not the only one who expresses concern and skepticism when it comes to Missandei. Alayaya has expressed concern as well as Yara, Bronn, Sandor, Robb, and even Daario, on some days.

Dany finally says, “Okay. Let’s put her on a performance improvement plan. Write out the plan. Go over it with her. Give her a month to meet standard. If she doesn’t —”

 _“When_ she doesn’t,” Drogo corrects.

Dany shoots him a look, but does not comment on that. She just continues on. “After a month, you will evaluate. And then you can let her go if she does not meet standard.”

 

 

  
Dany breaks the rules and, over a bottle of wine and a bunch of takeout containers on Dany’s couch after work, Dany plainly tells Missandei that Missy is about to get put on a performance improvement plan. Drogo is insisting on it and at this point, Dany can no longer put this off or dissuade him.

Dany sips from her glass, leaning against the back of the couch, and says, “You have one month to improve, or you’re fired from that department.”

For Missandei, this isn’t really a shocking surprise as much as it is just like . . . sort of a wake up call? She knew she was doing pretty bad. She didn’t know she was apparently doing _this_ bad. Her hands tingle as the new information sinks in.

“What are you thinking?” Dany asks softly.

And with surprising self-righteousness, Missy says, “I’m actually thinking that I don’t fucking think _hooking_ should be the gateway to field work! I am _good_ with people. I am good at asking questions and getting information! I have a lot of cultural knowledge. I know how to talk to people in nearly all the languages we use the most! I am weapons-trained! But yeah, I guess it fucking makes sense to test me for a year on how convincing I look as a sex worker, standing around half-naked in the dark, _waiting_ for someone to proposition me for sex work.” Missandei is shaking her head. _“Fuck Drogo!”_ she snaps. “He set me up to fucking fail.”

“Yeah, no, I agree,” Dany says, sighing. “I’m sorry. I can’t delay this much longer. He’s one of the heads of that department —”

“I know,” Missandei interjects. “I know you have been pushing hard for me. Thank you.”

“Hon,” Dany says flatly. “Can’t you just get better? At like, fucking looking like a sex worker? I feel like this is a real sticking point for that asshole. Just like, shut him up by just being _good at it.”_

Missy is shaking her head. Because if only it were that easy. She has spent the last year or so driving herself crazy trying to improve. She has talked to so many real prostitutes on her own time. She has burdened her pals for so many hours. She has taken not one, but like _multiple_ improv classes in addition to everything else. She has studied the shit out of this — living and breathing it. She has recorded interviews, so that she can try get the lingo and the speech down. She has stopped giving many shits about how she dresses herself or how her body looks. She has even conditioned her poor conservative father into like, being cool with the crazy shit that he must be imagining is going on with her.

Missy shoves a bunch of shiitake mushrooms into her face and holds it all in her cheeks. She tells Dany, “At this point, I don’t even think becoming an _actual sex worker_ and having sex with random men who give me money will make me any more convincing as a sex worker. Like, sometimes I get nutty and consider like, doing coke before work. I tell myself, hey, Missy, why not try heroin? Why not try crack? Maybe _that_ is the silver bullet?”

 

 

  
He makes it a point to Skype with his mom and dad at least once a week, so that they can see that he is alive and well. The conversations remain really tense and his mom seems really resentful, like she thinks she can make his inevitable, devastating death less painful if she can prime herself to be permanently pissed at him. So it’s been really fun.

He tells his folks about his modest gains. He got a spiffy new apartment. He takes walks after work. He goes to bed at a reasonable hour. He went to the cinema on Saturday. He’s been catching up with old buddies. Like, his life is actually pretty normal and mundane. He tells them that they should consider visiting — because he wants these fucking psychos to see the state of his life for themselves so they will stop worrying so goddamn much — but his parents answer that like this:

“Is your work still mandating that you see Dr. Tarly?”

Grey ignores how heated his dad sounds asking a pretty simple question. He answers simply. He says, “Yes, I see Dr. Tarly on a regular basis still.”

“And he still thinks you’re unwell,” his dad says mutinously.

“He has never said that.”

“Nudho, do you think it’s normal for your job to force you to see a doctor?” his mom shoves in, with a lot of hostility.

“Okay, relax,” he tells his parents. “He has a PhD. He’s only _sort of_ a doctor.”

His parents are glaring at him. Both of their angry faces fill up his entire computer screen. It’s funny — because at one point in life, they used to think he was cute, and they used to laugh at his jokes.

 

 

  
To get the fuck away from Stannis for a few minutes, because every fucking second away from Stannis is like a glimpse of sunshine after being molested in a dark dungeon for years, Grey leaves his desk and partakes in an organization-enforced morale-boosting activity. It is themed. There is tres leches cake in the cafeteria. There is also a taco bar with five different kinds of salsas. He knows this because some idiot woman from HR sent out a organization-wide email with shitty clipart. She accidentally cc’ed everyone instead of bcc’ed. So his inbox exploded this morning with a bunch of dumb assholes going, ‘Yay! Tacos!’ and a bunch of other dumb idiots responding-all to go, ‘Hey! Stop responding-all, people!’ The email from HR pimped the salsa bar.

It’s just as he suspected. It’s for white people. There’s mild salsa. Mild mango salsa. Mild green salsa. Pico de gallo, which isn’t really a salsa but okay. And there is spicy salsa for the adventurous eaters, which is actually just a regular type of salsa.

“Sup, baby?” Drogo says, suddenly appearing right beside him. Drogo’s paper plate is already loaded up with stacks and stacks of tacos. “How’s life with your boyfriend, Baratheon?”

It’s a joke. And it is hurtful. Grey says, “Shut up,” because he is kind of sensitive about this. He used to run a whole department. But sure. Now he spends all day listening to an old man sighing and grunting, when numbers don’t add up on a spreadsheet, which is like, _how is that even possible?_

Drogo sighs. “I’m going east next week for a few days. But you know what? When I get back, I’m going to start pushing for you to come back to us. It’s a fucking waste, having you do what you’re currently doing.”

“Nothing will move without the blessing of the shrink, man,” Grey points out, petulantly putting way too much meat over his one tortilla.

“I don’t get it,” Drogo gripes. “You are totally fine.”

“Man, don’t I fucking know it. I’ve been fucking trying to tell people this.”

“It’s management, man,” Drogo adds. “It’s leadership. Fuckers so out of touch, but somehow they get to make all of the big decisions that affect our lives and shit. Makes sense, right?” Drogo clears his throat. “Have you talked to your girl? Daenerys.”

“Man, she has been avoiding me I think.”

Drogo scoffs. “Sounds about right.”

When they set their plates down, Daario is already at the table. He has his arm curved around his plate, plastic fork in the other hand. He’s actually already moved onto cake. After taking a big swipe and shoving it into his mouth, he loudly says, “Oh my God! Why is this cake _wet!”_

 

 

  
Drogo hasn’t yet given Missy her PIP yet, so she’s definitely anxious and just going out of her mind preparing for just another terrible fucking conversation in which he tells her that she is a huge disappointment and cannot ever do anything right. This is why she skulks into the cafeteria as quietly and as inconspicuously as possible. She spots him right away, because her life is now about tracking Drogo’s whereabouts always, so that she can avoid offending him by breathing wrong — and failing at it.

She’s only got two tacos put together on her plate when Yara’s loud voice screams out, “Missandei! Over here! Saved you a warm seat, boo!”  
  
What the fuck.

 

 

  
They generally do not talk about work in the cafeteria — because of security reasons. There’s too much inter-departmental mixing, and certain departments do not have high-level clearance. This is why eating time is generally socializing time. This is partly why Grey is convinced he has friends. Like, he is talking to his friends about his life. He is telling them he bought a badass mattress. It came in a box. It is like sleeping on a fucking cloud that lovingly hugs.

“Hey, guys, real question,” Bronn says. “I hear you’re supposed to flip those motherfuckers, like how you’re supposed to rotate tires for even wear and tear. But my fuckin’ mattress has a pillowtop. I’m not supposed to flip that, right?”

“Nah, man,” Sandor says. “Don’t flip, But you gotta rotate it every once in a while.”

“Really though?” Bronn presses. “What difference would it make?”

“I think it’s more if there are two people in bed and one person is just heavier or bigger than the other,” Drogo says. “You wanna rotate so your mattress doesn’t get lopsided.”

“Oh, so no problem for Bronny then,” Daario cracks. “No one ever sleeps with him!”

“Because I tell them to get the _fuck out,”_ Bronn returns aggressively. “You know. After sex.” And then he starts laughing and waving his hands in front of his soggy, empty taco plate. He says, “No, just kidding. I’m a gentleman. I always ask nicely.”

“Here’s another real question,” Yara cuts in. “Memory foam or springs? Grey, already know where you fall on this, bro, but what about the rest of you?”

 

 

  
Missy pretty much spends lunch keeping her face shut as they all obsess over mattresses — even though she actually has opinions on mattresses because she has done a lot of research due to her dad’s back problems. She keeps her face shut because she doesn’t want to remind Drogo that he currently _hates her._

She just quietly eats her tacos and her cake next to Yara as the table explodes in incredulous laughter, when Gendry straight up admits that he acquired his mattress on the side of the road. He just pulled over and loaded the thing onto the bed of his truck. Took it home and started sleeping on it and everything. It is great! It’s a good mattress!

When Grey’s phone buzzes repeatedly and he looks down to check it, the smile on his face just dies on the spot.

“What’s going on?” she blurts. “What happened?”

If he’s surprised by her nosy concern, he doesn’t show it. He just rises from his seat, picking up his empty plate to throw it away. He says, “Fucking Stannis is what happened. He wants to know where I am. He’s calling me.” Grey lets out a soft groan that transitions to a high-pitched whine. “Why does he call me? Why doesn’t he just text? Or better yet, just leave me the fuck alone and trust that I will make my way back to him eventually?”

Drogo’s laugh, in response to that, is deep and syncopated.

Grey feels a little bit of tension inside of him release — upon hearing that familiar laugh. He actually doesn’t realize how much he misses having someone laugh at his jokes. He has forgotten how it feels to have someone kind of just _get him_ instead of just constantly telling him how he’s supposed to feel.

This is why Grey gives Drogo a quick pat on the shoulder, as he sighs and makes his way back to a world of fucking spreadsheets used all wrong.

 

 

 

 


	5. Grey and Missy get physical

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Drogo drops the PIP on Missy. She is in dire straits and needs to figure out how to get better in hurry. Grey has din-din with Theon, who is a little off-kilter, but actually, who is doing alright! Theon straight up asks Grey if Grey's been getting busy — like, sex-wise. Our boy is like, "LOL okay!" about it. And then he runs into the future love of his life at work-gym. She wants to ask him something important.

 

 

  
When Drogo finally sits her down and shows her her failings, documented and written out in humiliating detail, well, she didn’t think she could have more feelings about this. But she does. She kind of wants to cry as she signs the top page, which declares that she understands that she’s gonna get shit-canned if she doesn’t step it up significantly.

He asks, “Do you have any questions?”

And she says, “No. It’s all really clear.”

In the first few months of this, when he had these tough talks with her, he used to end the tough talks by telling her that he believed in her — she can do this!

Now, he just ends these talks in silence.

She’s afforded some privacy — the meeting happened behind closed doors and she’s not sure anyone besides Barristan knows she’s been put on a PIP. But the rest of the team certainly knows that she’s been underperforming for months now. From the way she walks around the building with her head held low, she is pretty sure the team knows the end is nigh.

She’s exhausted all of her resources. She’s trained for months with Alayaya. She’s trained for months with Yara. She’s trained for months with Kojja. They’ve switched up and looped around so many different training styles. They’ve practiced exercises for hours and hours in presenting a false identity to an audience that is hyper-alert and hyper-suspicious, who can completely put a bullet in her fucking head over one slip up or an error in judgement. Missandei understands the _gravity_ of it and the necessity of getting it right.

Alayaya and Yara, in particular, both have great talents in storytelling. They are good at talking. Yara is a good bullshitter. Alayaya is good at smoothly carrying on long conversations made up of lies with such ease.

Yara thinks that Missandei’s shyness and natural quietness and self-consciousness unnerves people and also prevents Missandei from being flexible under rapidly evolving situations or encounters. Yara is not sure this is something that is fixable — it might just be something innate and ingrained.

Alayaya _knows_ that Missandei looks down on prostitution and thinks that she is _better_ than sex work. Nothing wrong with that — but Missandei doesn’t _believe._ Alayaya thinks that this bleeds out of Missandei’s face. People can pick out that kind of rejection and judgement.

Kojja thinks that everything in Missandei’s past and everything about Missandei points to an aversion to deceit. Missandei can’t lie because she doesn’t believe in lying. That is a real problem in the work that they do.

The thing is, Missandei has solicited all of this brutal feedback. She _knows_ that her colleagues — her support system at work — feel this way about her work. Everyone is feeling the frustration here. She is, too. She is not sure whether she should just finally eat shit and just fucking quit today, or wait out the entire month.

When Missy wearily tells Dany this, Dany is quiet for a long time.

And then Dany says, “You should consider talking to Grey. Ask him for help.”

 

 

  
She’s a really terrible cook — like, the worst cook because while she can read a recipe, the inherent ambiguity in between the lines of directions makes her a bad cook. Like when she is told to ‘saute onions until soft’ — like, how soft? ‘Beat eggs into stiff peaks’ — like, mountain peaks? Those are really like, rock hard and rigid. ‘Bake until a toothpick comes out clean’ — how clean is _clean?_ Like, no crumbs at all?

She just has no interest in mastering this skill whatsoever. And in contrast to a number of her Naathi female peers who were whizzes in the kitchen from an early age, Missy’s parents did not really give many shits that she was bad at chores and in the kitchen. She was their youngest baby. Her older brothers took care of most of the chores. Her parents were older and more chill and also just run ragged by Moss’ and Mars’ respective rebellions against strictness already — so by the time they got their little girl, they were largely like, whatever. They noticed early on that she loved to read and she loved to learn. She was a little nerd from the get. So they looked at her and were like, ‘Oh shit. This one is actually going to be college-bound!’ They created conditions that made it easy for her to study. They didn’t force her to be any good at domestic skills.

This is why her freaking sixty-seven-year-old dad, a real manly man’s man in his youth, feels like he has to constantly follow her around with a broom and cleaning sponge. He constantly trails after her, picking up her clothes and her dirty plates of half-finished food that she leaves wherever she wants and strands and strands of her curly hair. He finds her hair in the carpet, all over the bathroom, in the drains. He often jokingly remarks that it’s a wonder she’s not bald, because she loses _so much hair,_ and it makes her all paranoid and touch her head. Because maybe she _is_ going bald in her old age.

He handwashes her bras without even thinking that it’s weird. He does so because he read the label on them, and the label said to hand wash in cold water and hang dry. So he was like, oh okay! Makes sense!

He hangs her bra on a clothesline, in the backyard. It’s real fucking old-school. And there actually a homeowners association rule against this — ditto hanging rugs over the railing of the deck — but her dad is old-school and old-country, so he doesn’t even give a fuck about rules that he doesn’t understand. He displays her bras in the sun for her neighbors to see. There haven’t been complaints yet.

She cooks though, whenever one of her brothers comes over to visit. It makes their dad too sad to cook Naathi food, so she has to step up and like, keep _doing something_ to help constantly honor their mom in some way.

“What is _this?”_ Moss says critically, but still slapping a spoonful of Missandei’s green mash into his daughter’s little bowl, rapidly breaking it up into pieces and mixing it up with rice. Missy didn’t expect her niece at dinner — otherwise she would’ve cooked one thing that was kid-friendly — her brother showed up with his daughter in tow and just started rifling through her fridge for a beer.

Rani is like, “Daddy, what is it?”

Moss blows off the question. He is like, “Just eat it.”

And magically, she just listens and starts eating.

Missandei is the one who says, “It’s — how do you say it in the Common Tongue? — it’s like spinach. But _not._ It’s _rauden_ — how do you say it?”

“She gets the point, sis,” Moss interrupts. “It’s a vegetable.”

“This is . . . good,” their dad says, before even tasting any of the food. He’s carefully blowing off some steaming heat off of the root vegetable soup that Missandei made.

Moss chuckles. He says, “Okay, Dad. If you say so.”

“How is work, baby?” her dad asks. He always asks her.

She gives him a chipper smile. She says, “Good! Thanks for asking!”

Moss freezes for a second — kind of flicking his eyes back and forth between her and their dad. And then he snorts.

 

 

  
Grey already thought it was kind of weird when Theon invited him over — to Theon’s house — for a private dinner, just for the two of them. But then it gets way weirder when he shows up with a six-pack and then discovers that the table is set really nicely with real cloth napkins and heavy silverware and like, mood-lighting.

All of the blinds are drawn even though it is still daylight outside. Lying innocuously on the dark granite kitchen island is a handgun. When Theon catches Grey looking at it, Theon explains that he just feels more comfortable with his gun close by. Grey shrugs and basically conveys that he didn’t ask — he doesn’t care. He calmly says, “Now I feel like I should’ve brought _my_ gun, so we can make it a real party.”

And _then_ it get even _weirder_ when Theon puts down a plate of like, insanely intricate and beautifully plated food. Theon explains to Grey it’s the first course. It’s a warm tomato salad with a basil oil and garlic puree, with burrata cheese that he made himself. Theon tells Grey he’s been experimenting with fresh cheese-making.

In response to all of this, Grey is like, “Oh.”

Theon keeps Grey’s wine glass filled during dinner — all five courses of it. Theon rolls his own glass and occasionally takes sips from the bulb, making a show of just really _tasting_ it as Grey stiffly tells Theon about work because that is one of their _two_ big commonalities. Grey tells Theon he’s frankly just fucking miserable at a desk and he just fucking wants to _end it all,_ but he has no other skills. So he is stuck.

Theon chuckles. He says, “You _can_ do _many_ other things, you know? That’s what I discovered, at least.” Theon gestures to the empty plate in front of him. “I took a cooking class to distract myself from the thoughts of suicide. And then it was like, oh damn. Tell me all about raw milk cheesemaking.” He snorts. He adds, “But then, I was never in that job for any of the right reasons.”

“Yeah,” Grey says, just to fill up the space.

Theon straightens in his chair. “How do you go back there, man? How do you walk through those hallways and not just like, want to burn the whole thing to ashes? They allowed it to happen to us, man. We were collateral damage, man. Our lives were just expendable to them.”

Grey clears his throat as he makes a grab for his wine glass, now muddied with his fingerprints. He says, “I don’t know, man. It just doesn’t bother me like that.”

And he doesn’t say it out loud, but he has speculated to himself that the difference between him and Theon is that Theon grew up believing he was special and unique and destined for greatness. Grey grew up knowing he was just a person, like any other person. And people like him generally are not destined for greatness, as much as they just have to work their asses off to just _get enough._ Grey wonders if maybe this is the reason why he has apparently coped with the accident better than Theon has.

Theon made a passionfruit panna cotta for dessert, a really delicate little jelly with a wiggle, molded into a dome. It makes Grey burst out laughing. He has to allay Theon’s concerns and explain that he’s not laughing to be an asshole. He’s laughing because it’s so beautiful — and it’s so fucking crazy that Theon is _about this_ now.

It’s when Grey is licking a streak of cream off of his spoon that Theon — who has been staring — suddenly asks, “Have you had sex with anybody yet? You know, since what happened to us?”

Grey freezes — and then he laughs again. It’s a combination of the wine, the utter bizarreness of his surroundings, the food he has eaten, and his dinner companion — that makes him laugh.

And then he says, “No,” as he slowly calms back down. “You?”

“No,” Theon says. “There’s a girl though —”

“Ah,” Grey says. “That explains the question. There is a girl.”

“A woman actually. In one of my classes. Um, she actually asked me out. We’ve gone out a couple of times.”

“That’s cool, man.”

Theon scoffs — but he is smiling. He says, “No, it’s not _cool,_ Grey. It’s _terrifying._ Women get really freaked out when, for the first date, you’re like, ‘Hey, wanna come back to my dark hovel and hang out with me and me alone even though we don’t know each other that well? Oh, and _my gun_ will be there, too.’ Like, that doesn’t really get the romance going. And beyond that — the thought of getting naked with a woman again — _that’s_ fucking terrifying. And she doesn’t know about _it_ yet. She just knows I have some anxiety leaving the house — she made the assumption that it’s agoraphobia and I’m like, just riding that out and letting her be misled so it can blow up in my face later. But like — when the fuck am I supposed to tell her? And _how_ do I even fucking explain to her what happened when I am _legally obligated_ to never talk about what happened?”

“Yeaaah, no idea, man,” Grey says, starting to smirk now. He doesn't know what everyone else is talking about. Theon isn’t _that much_ of a mess. Theon actually seems pretty okay. All things considered.

Theon points at him. “You’re awful. You’re an awful listener.”

“Nah, man,” Grey drawls. “I’m good at listening.”

“Okay,” Theon says, chuckling now. “You scared, too, man? You scared of getting naked with someone again? I mean, obviously you have to be. You haven’t had sex in over a year!”

“Actually, longer than that,” Grey quips, leaning deeply back into the straight back of Theon’s dining chair. “I wasn’t really seeing anyone leading up to the accident.” He is sucking down the rest of his wine. Then he says, “And I don’t think I’m as worried about it as you are. It’s actually just not something I think too deeply or too often about. Also, I have no prospects.” He gestures at his body. “Like, no one currently wants this, so it’s a non-issue.”

 

 

  
She is so nervous about asking Grey for help that she blows an entire week just pumping herself up for it. She is scheduled to go back out into the field mid-month. She has been prepping with the team repetitively, like normal. She can all sense their tired non-belief in her. In between being really freaked out and guilt-ridden about that, she manages to find the time and energy to feel very vulnerable and self-conscious about approaching someone like Grey for this weird kind of fruitless favor.

She is nervous about approaching him because he is intimidating. He used to lead everything and everyone. She used to occasionally interface with him on things here and there, and he was always really stressed out and really, really busy. She has been conditioned to kind of speak really efficiently and really quickly around him, so she doesn’t unnecessarily waste his time.

She is nervous about approaching him because her stupid life and her stupid problems are small. Grey suffered one of the most gruesome experiences anyone has ever suffered in the organization — and lived through it — and here she is, a fucking twerp, bothering him because she is fucking _terrible_ at playing pretend at sex work.

She is also nervous about approaching him because a lot of people keep whispering that he has been messed up by what happened to him — that he _needs_ to see Tarly and he _needs_ to work a desk job because his unpredictable emotional and mental state makes him a liability in the field. People have been sounding empathetic, as they talk about him behind his back. They say he’s so strong, but of course he has to be at least a little messed up. How can someone withstand hours of torture and watch their penis get cut off without suffering these deep psychological scars? How does someone even move on from that?

 

 

  
He _kind of_ runs into Missandei again at the gym, after regular work hours. It’s _kind of_ a chance meeting — because she totally did this on purpose. He can tell because her demeanor when she walks in is completely different from her normal demeanor — from the way she walks to the way she carries herself to where her gaze falls to the way she holds her hands.

She’s not upfront about it. She actually goes to a treadmill and starts punching buttons. He figures he can’t do anything besides just go along with the information he’s being given, so he just lies back down on the weight bench and carries on with his workout.

He finishes his workout in twenty minutes, to the steady thump-thump-thump of her footsteps on the treadmill. He can feel her watching him again.

He’s on his way out, when her soft voice calls out to him.

 

 

  
She’s babbling like a loon. She can feel herself giving him _way too much_ information. She starts just telling him _everything._ She accidentally says, “You might already know — but I am terrible at my job,” and then she wants to kick herself over it because, _you might already know?_ Like when? When would he even have the fucking time or inclination to look up the details of her stupid boring life?

As she’s feeling mightily embarrassed, Grey actually holds in a sigh and continues kind of absorbing the information patiently. He actually _does_ already know. Because Drogo and Robb told him. He asked about her and how her training was going. Drogo told him that it is the biggest shitshow ever and she is just fucking _awful._

When Grey ran the department, there was no fucking way someone like Missandei would last an entire year being this awful. He’d flush out underperformers fast. When he dryly intimated as much to Drogo, Drogo had stiffly told him that it has been hard to get around fucking Dany. This is Dany’s girl. Drogo just resented the implication that he wasn’t being smart about this or protecting his people well enough. Drogo felt kind of stung that it was coming from Grey.

“Hey, you should just resign,” he cuts in — interrupting her babbling. “You should quit and save everyone time and resources. That’s the right thing to do.”

 

 

  
Her face — her cheeks in particular — are just _burning_ so hot. She feels so humiliated and embarrassed and just really hurt. Because he doesn’t really know her at all — not really. He doesn’t know how hard she works. He doesn’t know _how much_ she wants this. And she doesn’t mean being fucking good at being a fake prostitute. She means how much she wants beyond just a desk job. She is _more_ than just an interpreter. She is _more_ than just a consultant.

He is despondently telling her to quit, and Missy’s mind is screaming out in pain, like _what the fuck!_ She doesn’t understand why Dany directed her to this person, if this person was just going to crush the rest of her fucking self-esteem to bits.

With sweat droplets carving their way down her face, she says, “Um, I wasn’t really looking for advice on whether or not to quit. I was more looking for —”

“Oh, I know,” he says, talking over her, interrupting her. “I was just cutting to the end so we don't have to have a long heart-to-heart about it. You need to quit. So that you don’t get someone or yourself killed. That’s _going to happen,_ if you keep pushing this delusion along. And you don’t want _that_ on your conscience, man. Trust me.”

She softly scoffs. She says, “You don’t really know me — to say a thing like that —”

“Oh, I do,” he says confidently. “I know your type. Like, I know that you were a really good student. You were probably a really good, obedient little girl, growing up in Naath, doing everything that was expected of you and told to you by your parents. I know you studied _real_ hard, got all of the As, went hunting with your pops, and tussled with your brothers. I get that you learned the shit out of krav maga or _whatever._ I get you achieved black belt status or _whatever_ — and I think that’s _super cute.”_

 

 

  
When she starts to cry, it only confirms to Grey what he thinks he already knows about her. It confirms to him that she is not cut out for this work. She is too sensitive. She is too emotional. She is too anxious and nervous. She will crumble under any kind of stress. He _barely_ applied any stress on her — and _look_ — she is breaking apart right before his eyes.

He thinks that this is what Drogo couldn’t stomach. Drogo couldn’t get to _this_ with her because Drogo cares too much about her. Drogo let it drag on too long, because Drogo couldn’t make her understand that she needs to get the fuck out, before someone fucking _dies_ due to her weaknesses.

“Why do you jog anyway?” Grey asks her wet face. “Like, what is the point? To have the lung capacity to be able to outrun a bullet? _Okay.”_

“You’re a fucking _asshole,”_ she says, through a sharp hiccup.

“I mean, obviously,” he says. “See, it’s concerning that you are _just_ realizing this.”

Through her tears, she actually rolls her eyes at him.

He just grins.

She sees his smile — and she actually fucking wants to _break_ his teeth _from his face._

He sees her hand twitch.

His smile widens.

He cheerfully says, “Oh my God, am I about to see some krav maga right now?”

She mutters, “Oh my God,” in disbelief. He is fucking taunting her right now. She says, “Don’t test me.”

“Right,” he says, still smiling. “I’m really scared of you.”

“You should be.”

 _“Okay,”_ he says mockingly.

She pulls her fist back, and for a second, it actually looks like she is really going to punch him in the face. And then when she looks through the veil of her tears, into his eyes — which are just fucking eyes but they are deep and assessing and knowing and it’s just fucking _throwing_ her the fuck off — she wavers and opens her fist.

He catches her hesitation. His smile turns victorious — like he just thinks he knows her and he predicted this and she is just devoid of surprises — that all she ever does is struggle to meet the very low bar that people fucking have of her.

“Are you going to hit me?” he asks her, his voice soft and his eyes very, very amused.

She says, “Fuck you. Are you asking to be hit, right now?”

“Don’t you know?”

“What!” she barks, with her hand still in the air.

“God, Missandei. Come _on.”_

“What the fuck?” she pushes out again. “What is this — is _this_ — what!”

She really wants to randomly accuse him of getting off on this and making this weirdly sexually charged. Because _this thing_ that they have going on _right now,_ is really _weird._ And _not_ normal.

Just to hurt him like he has hurt her, she really considers blurting this out, blurting out if _this weird shit_ is what happens when a guy like him gets his dick cut off _or what?_ Is this all he has left then? Just fucking pathetic power trips to get off on because he has _no dick_ anymore?

She really thinks about saying something mean like that to him, just to get him back.

But she looks into his face and she honestly just _can’t._ She just _can’t_ fucking say _that_ to _him._

In her ongoing hesitation — which he is following avidly and taking in — he softly says, “If you don’t throw the first punch, someone else will. That’s a lesson from me to you.” He looks at her open hand. “Is that okay with you?”

Fresh tears are coming out of her eyes as she stares back at him. She says, “What? Oh my God. What? What are we talking about right now? Are we talking about what _I think_ we’re talking about?”

“Yeah,” he says easily. “We are talking about the same thing. Is it okay with you?”

She’s still staring at him. _“Huh?”_

He waits her out.

And as her heart jack-hammers in her chest, she says, “Okay, yeah. Yeah, it’s okay. I think. Yeah. It’s okay. Do it. Ahh! Yes. _Do it.”_

“Mmmkay.”

“Are we about to make out?” she suddenly blurts.

 _This_ actually throws him. His jaw drops, and he is like, _“What?”_

And then as he recovers from her blurt, Missy starts releasing a high-pitched, but very muffled scream as she tenses up her entire body.

And then fast as all fuck, Grey pulls his arm back to get the force he’s gonna need for this — he opens his hand because he doesn’t actually want to break bones in her face — and then before she can fully shut her eyes closed, he _slams_ his hand right into the side of her face, right into her cheek. The force and shock and deafening sound of it makes her drop her own hand as her head snaps, as her body sways to the left. She exhales.

And then her face is in _pain._ Her ear is ringing from the loud sound of the slap. And then her numb hand feels like it’s fighting underwater, as she slowly reaches up to touch her face. She discovers she is bleeding a little bit, from inside her mouth. She looks at the blood on her fingers in bewilderment.

And then she looks back up at him.

 

 

 

 


	6. Missy is a victim of assault

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy goes to work with a black eye, which really freaks out Drogo and brings out that really attractive protective streak in him. Missy cannot even be bothered with Drogo's feelings about her face because she's more focused on getting dranks with the ladies OMG she finally gets to hang with the cool kids! Then, feeling pretty high on her recent gains, Missy tries to like, not-date the future love of her life. Future love of her life might actually be in big trouble for hitting her in the face. UH OH.

 

 

  
He notes that what she has going for her is that she is really, really quiet when she gets hit. Some people are screamers, but Missandei clenched her teeth and just let out a soft gasp when he hit her.

“Hey,” he says, gently now, reaching his hands back up to touch her face — and when she sees the motion, she _flinches_ and curls her body away from him instinctively. She shuts her eyes for a moment, like she’s expecting to get hit again.

He is thinking to himself that she is just _so green_ , and he really hopes that she’s not going to fucking get herself killed because of her inexperience. He also thinks that this _heartbreaking shit_ — her face, her eyes, her body language — that she constantly telegraphs all the time can either continue being what it currently is — a serious flaw. Or it can be an asset with a little more training.

He grabs her face firmly anyway, even though she is shrinking away from him. He’s pulling her closer to examine the mark he left. He says, “How does it feel?” as he looks over the darkened, swelling welt that his hand left on her face.

She looks at him with such wariness, even though she is allowing him to touch her like this. He knows that she is still trying to get over being hit.

She mutters, “It hurts. How do you think it feels?”

He smiles at that, as he experimentally runs the pad of his thumb over the welt on her cheekbone. “Does that hurt?”

“Grey!” she snaps, like he is slow. “Yes, it hurts!”

He pushes a little harder, smearing his thumb across her tacky skin. She whimpers a little bit as he does it. He explains, “I’m just breaking up more blood vessels, so the bruise will show darker.”

It sounds pretty comical to her. And the adrenaline that was flooding her body has waned a bit. Her heart is slowing down to like, just mere panicked levels. Also, this crazy shit feels way _intimate._ What the fuck, is he doing this _on purpose?_

“I’ve never been hit like that before,” she says, trying to sound conversational about it as her face just _throbs._

He laughs softly as he continues massaging out more blood. “I can tell,” he says.

“Well, I mean, my brothers and I ‘tussled’ like you said. And I got slapped in the face sometimes,” she says. “But no one has ever hit me with like, that kind of intention before. Like, my parents loved me and weren’t abusive.”

“No physically abusive boyfriends either, eh?” he asks lightly.

She reaches up to grab at his wrist. Because it’s too much. It is seriously really painful. She squeezes his forearm and tries to gently pry his hand from her face. She says, “Ah, no. But you probably already knew that about me, didn’t you?”

“Nah,” he says, dropping his hand. “You’re right. I actually don’t know you that well. I just knew what to say to get you all worked up.”

She smiles uneasily at that. She says, “You need to stop flirting with me.”

This makes him laugh again. “You need to stop asking me to make out with you.”

“I did not!”

“You kind of did, man,” he says, taking a small step back and away from her now. “That was way weird, man.”

“I was trying to like, break the tension.” She is gesturing between the two of them. “Because it felt really like — _you know.”_

“Yeah, it was weird, how you made it super sexual.”

 _“What!”_ Her jaw drops.

And then he laughs again. Right at her. He’s swaying as he laughs, and she feels like a total tool about it because _now_ she knows that he is messing with her. _Again._ The _psycho._

Her face is heating up again — in embarrassment or shame or excitement or like, all three things, _what the fuck._ To try and cover up how awkward she feels, she changes the subject. “Can I put ice on this?” she asks. “It just freaking like — it _hurts._ Like, should I take aspirin? Or would that mess with what you just did here?”

She sees the amused look he flashes at her. She just generally shrinks inside to nearly nothing when she catches that look in his eyes. She feels silly and naive and small.

“See, that’s your main problem, babe.” He presses a forefinger into her forehead. She assumes that he’s about to tell her that she thinks too goddamn much, and she already knows this.

But actually, what he ends up saying is, “You just don’t trust yourself.”

 

 

  
He tells her he has another five minutes, then he’s gonna bounce. He announces his oncoming departure with expectation, with his arms crossed over his chest and his stare unwavering on her. Missy spastically is like, _lost,_ for a few seconds. And then she understands what he is saying. She is discovering that this guy just loves communicating in subtext all the time, rather than explicitly. She is wondering if he does this because he is so well-trained, to never be transparent about what he is actually doing or what he is actually thinking or what he is actually feeling. She finds that she has to fight to read between the lines with him, constantly.

“Missandei,” he cuts into her thoughts. “You have four minutes left.”

Her mind basically screeches in panic — because there is apparently a countdown clock, _what the fuck._ And then she blurts, “What do you think are the quickest areas of improvement I can tackle, in the next week?”

 

 

  
Missy tries to hide her face from her dad even though he’s going to see it _eventually,_ obviously. But she would like to not have it happen _tonight._ She tries to scurry up to her bedroom without him getting up from bed and meeting her in the kitchen — but he catches her, because he is faithful in how he looks out for her.

He takes in her face in silence — his eyes are just breaking her heart — and then he quietly says, “Is this what you really want?”

She tears up. Her voice is pleading and true and honest, as she says, “Yes. This is what I _really_ want.”

 

 

  
Missandei shows up to the run-through early in the morning wearing a sad pastel baby doll yellow dress that she wore just like, last summer. These are her regular clothes. Grey told her that the sexy shit is not really her vibe — it’s not really what she’s about — it’s not a thing that she embodies convincingly because she ain’t Yaya. He told her to dress like herself — but as herself when she is trying to look pretty, but in a way where she’s too embarrassed to look like she’s trying so hard.

She actually knew exactly what he meant. And fuck him for that.

She tried to sort of protest against the sexy thing, because she is constantly embarrassed by his really incisive breakdowns of her based on like, _two seconds_ of conversation. She told him that she _can_ be sexy. _Sometimes._

And he stared at her like, are you done now?

She generally shrank and sheepishly asked him how else he thinks she should adjust.

She's wearing very little makeup because he told her not to wear any.

So she shows up to the run-through in her dress, with very little makeup, and with a crazy black eye and a dark, mottled bruise that crawls down her face.

When Drogo sees her, he is like, “What the _fuck?”_ And he is sure she has fucking lost her goddamn mind and she has to get pulled off of this like, _right now._

It’s Yaya who grabs Drogo’s shoulder and stops him from like — blowing a gasket into Missandei’s fucked-up face. Yaya says, “Hey, hold on. There’s something here.”

 

 

  
They run through everything with everyone a few times, and it’s pretty much pitch perfect every single time. They run through several scenarios and it works, every single time. Missy can sense this — she can sense the complete bewilderment of her colleagues.

And she has literally done nothing differently. She acts like how she always acts. She still comes off a little nervous and a little scared and a little self-protective and self-conscious.

It just _works_ today.

Missandei is so fucking hyped on the effectiveness of this adjustment that she starts slapping her own face hard over the course of the day, to deepen the bruise on her face and get it darker. When Yaya catches her, Yaya laughs fondly and tells her that they can like, do some things with makeup, actually. Missandei doesn’t always have to get hit in the face in order to do her job well.

Missy says that it looks realer when it is real. She says that there is something that is extra special about authenticity.

 

 

  
Drogo is not happy, even though everything went _really well_ during the run-through. Robb told him that, holy shit, he thinks it’s going to work well this time. Drogo actually agrees, but he is still pissed about it.

He calls her into an empty conference room. She follows in behind him without shrinking, like she is confident in her abilities now. He thinks it’s a strange look on her. And after closing the door, he gestures to her face. Then he crosses his arms.

He says, “How did that happened? Who _did this_ you?” And then he shakes his head right away, because he already _knows._ He just has to think it through. He spits out, “So Grey did this to you,” because this kind of shit, this kind of severity, has Grey’s fingerprints all over it.

“Um, it’s not what you think,” Missandei says softly.

“Uh, he _assaulted_ you,” Drogo says heatedly. “And that is _not_ okay.”

“Grey _didn’t_ assault me whatsoever,” she says carefully. “Not even close.” She is being super careful not to say anything that will implicate Grey, because Grey will get into a lot of trouble if he is charged with like, assaulting a colleague at work. Like, that is a serious offense. “Um, I would rather you not . . . say that. Because it’s untrue.”

 _“Missy_ — fucking coworkers can’t go around beating each other’s faces in — to be _helpful.”_

“Um, no one beat my face in,” she says. “And you need to know, Grey has always been very respectful with me.”

“The fuck!” Drogo snaps. “You sound like — why do I feel like I’m talking to _my fucking mother_ right now? And it’s just — I just want to shake some _sense_ into you. But that would be assault, too.” He shakes his head. “We don’t assault each other, Missandei! That’s not we do here!”

“Yeah, we just kill people.”

“Oh my God!” he bellows. “You have Grey-jokes now!”

“Drogo,” she says lowly. A smile is threatening to take over her busted face. “I feel like . . . I am meeting the standards you set. Right? In my performance improvement plan?”

 

 

  
Many things about Missandei’s face and Missandei’s demeanor draws out these protective feelings from Drogo. He looks at her and he sees a reflection of a bunch of women that he cares about and loves deeply. He actually doubts his own judgement here — he agonizes over it for _hours_ because Grey is his boy, and Grey has been through _so much._

But then he thinks about what he would want done, if this had happened to one of his sisters at work. He thinks that it doesn’t fucking matter that the nature of their work is violent. He thinks that they must all treat each other with the utmost respect, because they are all professionals here and they all must _trust_ each other with _their lives._ He thinks that if this had happened to one of his sisters at work, he would want someone to speak up for her. He would not want some asshole to protect an abuser just because they are boys.

Drogo thinks that often, perpetrators are also victims themselves.

Drogo hadn’t realize that it’d be so easy to flip him. He feels fucking terrible about this, because he’s been saying it for months to anyone who would listen. He’s been saying that everyone is wrong about Grey and he is _fine_ and it’s pathetic and racist that none of them are giving Grey a chance again. Drogo has been putting his own reputation on the line, trying to get Grey back in the field, making all of these unrealistic promises to people in leadership, who just don’t care enough.

He knocks on Daenerys’ closed door. She is in there with Tarly, and that is why she tries to wave him off, through the glass wall, for a while. She tries to signal to him to put a meeting on her calendar instead of just barging in.

But it’s actually relevant that Tarly is in there. And this is serious. For one, he is pretty positive that one of their people assaulted another one of their people. This has to be reported — and then investigated internally.

He opens the door.

 

 

  
When Yaya, Kojja, and Yara ask her out for drinks after work, Missandei seriously looks around the locker room just in case there is someone else they are talking to — even though the three of them are staring her down from their standing positions. She quickly pulls her bra over her chest and squeaks out, “Me?”

Kojja laughs. She’s already dressed. She says, “Yeah, _you._ You busy tonight?”

Missandei’s heart feels like it wants to just _burst_ out of her chest. Her face is sweaty and stiff because it is swollen. She nods eagerly. She says, “Yes! I have to call my dad though! So he knows not to wait up with dinner tonight!” Missy knows she sounds like a real fucking dork right now, but she doesn’t care! She doesn’t care at all! She never gets asked out for drinks by the ladies! Never! They always go out to drink without her! It didn’t really hurt her feelings that much! She gets it! But this is _so cool!_

As if reading her mind, Yaya starts cracking up. She can see the moony-eyed expression on Missy’s face. She jokingly says, “Don’t make us regret this, okay?”

“Okay!” Missy says, nodding vigorously.

 

 

  
Over drinks — over a martini because that’s what Yaya drinks and Missy was too shy to order her usual, which is a rum and Coke and _is that not cool?_ — the ladies settle into their chairs and then straight up ask her how she got that gnarly shiner. Like, did she do it to herself? Did she have a friend do it? Did she drop something on her face? How did this magic happen? And how did she figure it out?

“Um,” Missy says nervously, still worried about implicating Grey. She is realizing how much of a risk it was for him, to hit her in the face. Holy shit. It actually displays a lot of trust in her, for him to hit her in the face and bank on her not telling on him.

“You can’t tell us,” Yara guesses. “Because it would get your buddy in trouble. Because . . . your buddy works with us.”

“Is it Drogo?” Kojja guesses.

“Nah,” Yaya says. “He is so pissed about this. It’s not Drogo.”

“Robb?”

Yara snorts.

“Sandy?”

“Nah, it’s not Sandy,” Kojja said. “He and I met up last night with Daario and Gendry. They have alibis.”

“Guys, why are we assuming it’s one of the dudes?” Yara says. And then her eyes widen. “Was it _Pia?”_ And then she adds, “Why would you ask _Pia_ to hit you in the face when you could’ve been asking _me!”_

 

 

  
So, now that she knows he did her a _massive solid_ at professional risk to himself, she tries to thank him for it, in a for real way. She realizes that it’s hilarious that she wants to thank him for hitting her in the face and helping her stave off her execution for a while.

So like, with her heart pounding hard in her chest, and also with her shiner still looking just _fantastic,_ she corners him at his car early in the morning, when he arrives at work. She’s been like, waiting for him to arrive and park in his spot. Like a fucking stalker.

He is not even startled when she pops out and says, “Hi, Grey!” to him as he’s exiting his car.

As he pulls his bag out of his car, he just asks her, “Why the hell are you waiting for me like this? It is really weird.”

She forces herself to blurt it out. She asks him, “Hey! Can I buy you lunch or dinner sometime? To thank you for just saving my ass and my job?”

She spent the previous night agonizing over this gesture because she wants to make it believably classy. They have a no-dating policy at work. None of them on the team can ask each other out and make gaga eyes at each other. That kind of stuff compromises the work. And it can easily turn into sexual harassment. And that is not cool.

But like, she isn’t sure if the policy actually is still relevant to the two of them since he works in an entirely different department now, and there are no power dynamics to exploit between the two of them because nobody is supervising the other person, _but still._ No-dating policy. It’s important to have one.

She totally doesn’t want this guy to think that she is like, trying to cross boundaries with him by asking him out to lunch or dinner. Like, she doesn’t want him to think she is like, _into him_ just because they had a really bizarre and really sexualized encounter in the gym before he saved her fucking ass because he is kind of a _genius,_ holy _shit._

Yeah, so all of the obsessive thinking is for nothing. Because he seriously stuns her by _rejecting_ this gesture. Grey takes in her offer with a grave nod of his head.

And then he is like, “Nah, it’s all good.” He says, “Don’t worry about it. It ain’t a big deal. Any time, man. If you need help that I can fit into five-minute increments, I’m here for you, man.” And then he laughs — at himself and how funny he finds himself.

She is like, “Oh, okay,” as she looks at him with uncertainty. “So you really _don’t_ want to get a free meal from _me?”_

Like, this is a real question. Like, she really wants to know.

But he responds by laughing in her face. And then he reaches out and gently pushes her shoulder, like he’s joshing with her and saying, oh you! Like he thinks she’s fucking idiot trying to tell a joke for the first time in life.

She helplessly says, “No, _seriously,”_ as he’s walking away, toward the elevators, as he’s chuckling still. His laugh is echoing in the garage. “Grey! Are we friends now! We are, aren’t we! So is that a yes to dinner?”

It’s fucking totally not. _Shit!_

Missy goes into work just really humiliated and embarrassed even though no one else witnessed this. He is just really great at making her feel this way.

Missy just goes into the office going, _FML FML FML!_

 

 

  
So she ends up buying him a present on her lunch break to get this debt off her back. She was raised a certain way, and that is with an awareness of debt and of preserving honor. Her parents taught her that when people do something nice for her, she should pay it forward and do something nice back. At minimum, good deeds should be balanced. At best, she should strive to go beyond the minimum.

The thing is, she has no idea what this guy even fucking _likes_ or is into. She’s known him for years, but she has no idea what clothes he wears when he’s not working or what his favorite food is or what he needs in life.

It feels utterly stupid to give him cold hard cash — also doing so would put a clear value on how much his help is worth. It’s probably priceless to her, so she really can’t give him a gift card to a coffee shop and let him think that his invaluable help is worth three lattes.

She buys him a plant for his desk and a bottle of wine — as if this is any better. She actually just buys him a really nice bottle of wine in a panic and then supplements the bottle with a plant because somehow that felt a little better than just a bottle of alcohol?

She buys a stupid card after spending probably an hour reading every fucking card that exists at the grocery store near work. She picks the blandest card that says nothing and is blank inside. She agonizes for a while, trying to figure out what to write in the card. She eventually settles on, “Grey, thanks!” And then signs her name.

She wants to give him his shit in person, but when she walks by his desk, he is not there and his manager is like, “Hello, can I help you?” as he stares at her super hard.

Sometimes she forgets she has a black eye, and it freaks normal people out. She says, “Oh! Is Grey going to be back soon?” as she clenches the handle of her gift bag and hugs this peace lily closer to her stomach.

“I have no idea,” Grey’s manager grumbles. “He comes back when he feels like coming back.”

Oh, awesome. Awkward tension.

 

 

  
Grey can tell there is something off right away. And then it gets confirmed when Sam tells him to sit down, instead of telling him to grab a jacket because they are going on a walk.

Sitting in Sam’s office, with Sam’s face tired and concerned, Grey sighs. Because he already knows. He still says, “What’s going on?”

Sam says, “Grey, there was an incident logged —”

“Against me?”

“No, not against you. Just concerning you.”

 

 

 


	7. Grey is a menace, Missy figures out fake-hooking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey is on the cusp of being reprimanded for being helpful, and he kind of has a meltdown over it. Missy's got her game face on and is ready to be a fake-hooker convincingly because her career and reputation are on the line here. Grey wants to know what kind of psycho tattles on someone and then gives them a bottle of alcohol. Missy starts to get those warm and fuzzy feelings for her future boo.

 

 

 

  
This might be the very first time since his accident that he questions his own brain — that he actually questions his sanity and the soundness of his judgement.

Because he made a stupid mistake and he acted impulsively, which goes very much against his nature. It was just — they’ve all done things while in the field, for the sake of maintaining cover or for the sake of building trust with a contact. They’ve all had moments when they were shown a weapon and told to prove that they are who they say they are.

And he supposes that in the context of his entire history, he just didn’t think it was a big deal to take a shortcut in helping Missandei look more like the part. He thought he was actually thinking about other people — her safety, her team’s safety — when he hit her.

But is he actually  _crazy?_  Would he have arrived at the same conclusion  _before_  his accident?

When Grey is asked by Sam what his response might be to these concerns of an assault occurring between two colleagues, Grey straightforwardly asks, “Can you define assault for me?”

Which makes Sam frown, because he is very, very worried about Grey. Sam softly says, “You  _know_  what the definition of assault is.”

“There’s usually an intent to harm aspect —”

“Grey,” Sam softly interrupts, to stop the flow of what was definitely going to be Grey’s very pragmatic rationalizations. “There are legitimate concerns that you physically harmed another employee. Do you understand that this is a very serious matter?”

Grey sighs softly. He says, “Yeah, I do.”

 

 

  
Sam tells him that usually when complaints get filed, an investigation is not automatically instigated. At the moment, Grey is not being investigated because while the allegation is very serious, the complainant in this was a supervisor and not the employee in question. Thus, what will likely happen is that an internal affairs representative will come in and conduct interviews with Grey, the employee in question, the supervisor who logged the issue, and others. After which, depending on findings, there are several options, which may span from informal like facilitation or mediation or formal — like an investigation.

Sam tells Grey this could result in termination, if he is found to have assaulted a coworker, especially on campus.

Sam gently asks, “Is there something you want to tell me?”

Grey wonders just  _what_  is bound here by doctor-client confidentiality. Certainly if he is found breaking any laws, that would go out the window.

So Grey stands up. He smiles. He says, “Nah, I’m good.” Then he clears his throat. “Our time is up, doc.”

 

 

  
She runs to quell her anxious, busy mind. Tonight is especially important, so this is why she hits the gym before the day is over. She walks on the soft padded flooring, bouncing a little on the way to the treadmills. She thinks about how she was _just here_  last night — and a smile just tugs at her warm face.

She kind of thinks about him a little bit — she mostly just thinks that he is a very nice man, actually. He seems like he is a very thoughtful person, actually.

 

 

  
When Grey gets back to his desk and sees a wine gift bag with a bow on it and a plant, he looks at Stannis questioningly.

Without turning around or away from his computer, Stannis says, “A woman came by and asked for you.”

Clearly. Grey picks up a white envelope and flicks over the top tab. He pulls out the card — it’s a landscape photo of a lighthouse — and reads the inside of the card.

Then he drops the card and envelope into the recycle bin — he gets the general gist. He walks over to Stannis’ desk. He nudges the peace lily onto a corner of it. To Stannis, he says, “You like plants. Have this.”

Even Stannis has the good sense to say, “This was a gift to you, though.”

 

 

  
The sun is still in the sky, but warm, orange-y, and pink when she takes her post in the massage parlor with darkened windows. Her room is wired. Yara, Robb, and Sandor are also posted nearby. Daario is in the car with Drogo and Alayaya.

She touches her face, slick and bare. Grey told her that if she doesn’t wear makeup, she will look a fair bit younger. He told her to be quieter, that she is never going to have the gift of gab — that’s cool. He doesn’t either. That is why he is quiet a lot when he is working, too.

It doesn’t take long for the front door of the place to jingle.

She lines up against the wall with the other girls.

He says, “You’re new.”

She quietly says, “Yeah.”

 

 

  
Grey leaves work early.

Stannis gets on his ass for not naming files the stupid way that Stannis likes files named, and Grey just can’t fucking take any more of this shit today. He just doesn’t really see the fucking point in duty-fulfilling currently. They don’t fucking want him back, and it’s really fucking pathetic and unbelievable, that he fucking gave his life — like his entire life — over to them and they don’t even give one shit about him. He thinks it’s fucking ridiculous that he bled and he lost a significant part of himself for them and for a belief in greater purpose — only for them to throw this shit into his fucking face. He  _only_  got tortured for days before his dick was cut off, and he was left to bleed out  _on the ground_  as they just hemmed and hawed and debated over trading finite resources for _his fucking life._  It was not as if his dick could have been spared if they didn’t sit on their fucking asses  _debating_  over whether or not he and Theon were  _worth it._

So now he gets to be just a fucking freak who pathetically crawled back on his hands and knees to a job and people who do not fucking  _want him back,_  to people who  _will not_  take  _one_  fucking  _meeting_  with him. Now, they are trying to give him one last kiss off, with a fucking bullshit assault and battery allegation. He was just fucking  _trying_  to help her stay fucking safe. But he supposed he should have just followed the fucking bullshit rules that fucking rich assholes who know fucking  _nothing_  about what the dangers actually are come up with, because why even look at complex gray areas and look at people’s humanity,  _right?_  Why not just destroy the fucking very last bit of his reputation by villianizing him and branding him a fucking  _assaulter_  of  _defenseless_  fucking  _women?_  He should just fucking go  _kill himself_  because there is no fucking  _point_  in any of this.

So he actually doesn’t do anything drastic. Because he’s not really that suicidal. He still has the wherewithal to know that his death would really fuck up his mom, and he’s fucking done enough to his mom. If she dies early from stress or heartbreak, he will know it’s all his fucking fault.

He actually just despondently walks around town, in his suit and Missandei’s fucking present, what the  _fuck?_  He can’t fucking do hard drugs because he probably fucking  _shouldn’t,_  and it’s just inconvenient to _go get some._  He can’t cry because  _fuck that._  He can’t go fucking  _beat the shit_  out of a person because hitting people and not keeping his hands to himself is  _exactly_  why he is in the predicament that he is currently in.

When he notices that the wine has a twist cap, he actually cracks it open and starts drinking it because he is thirsty. He looks at the label and, again, he is like, what the fuck is  _her deal?_  He wonders if she was the one who told on him to Drogo — and then bought him a fucking  _present?_  Why the fuck is he the only one in  _mandatory therapy?_

When he sees the flashing of lights from a cop car, he tells himself that he is probably going to die now.  _Great._  This will devastate and ruin his mother.

He brings the heavy bottle to his mouth and just tries to take down the rest of the wine, because why the fuck not?

 

 

  
While the parlor is actually really hopping, it actually takes nearly an hour before she gets picked. A lot of the guys pick out their regulars, women that they have a pre-existing arrangement or relationship with. While interviewing the girls, she learned about how sometimes, the most exhausting part of sex work is actually feigning emotional connection. They have told her that sex is just sex, and that’s work. But to like, appear to have to give a shit about some loser’s marital problems or his work stresses is like — it is sometimes a lot.

Missandei has probably actually had more training on the logistics of sex work from these ladies more than she got from work. There aren’t as many female field agents as male, and the division of labor remains inherently unfair in this respect. Drogo excitedly threw her into this kind of work when she first expressed an interest in field work. He didn’t really ask her what she envisioned for herself. But then, she supposes that her employer really isn’t about figuring out what the fuck is holistically fulfilling and rewarding for her and what will help her grow as a person. Her employer is really about how they can slot her into the holes that they need filled.

She recognizes him — she thinks — when he walks in. They have never met before, but she is pretty sure he is the one. He is skinny and white — young and a little jittery. That is why she is the best fit for this job.

He is also armed. There is a bulge under his shirt.

He looks into her face. He asks her, “How much?”

She says, “A hundred for an hour. Four hundred for the whole night.”

He looks as if he thinks that is expensive. He says, “Does that include anal?”

She actually has a visceral response to this on the inside, which shows outside as a very tiny flinch. She says, “No. That is extra fifty on top.”

“How much for a blow job?”

She says, “Fifty.”

He seriously looks like he thinks she is not worth that much. He frowns.

Usually she would say something — sort of try to make a confident case for like, her pretend-dick-sucking skills. But tonight, she just stays quiet and just waits it out.

“Okay.”

 

 

  
So Grey kind of gets arrested — not for the open container of alcohol. He actually only gets fined for that. And he’s also not getting arrested because of the public intoxication — the cops are making that clear to him.

He is getting arrested because he is being such a fucking asshole.

It’s because he refuses to stop drinking the wine when they ask him to. It’s because he’s refusing to put the bottle down. It’s because, even though he knows he should keep his fucking mouth shut, he starts mocking the officers for being fucking mall cops. It’s because he is actually at the entrance of a mall. There’s a fountain, and just a buttload of people staring at him. He fucking realizes that  _this_  is a thing, and he’s kind of in deep shit right now — but what does it even  _matter_  anymore?

He dares them to shoot him. He tells them that he is unarmed Black man — and for a split second, he actually questions whether or not that is true — and then he remembers that it  _is._  He is not carrying his gun today.

He points to  _all the fucking people_  who are not minding their fucking  _business,_  and he tells the fucking mall cops that he has fucking  _witnesses._  Not that it even fucking  _matters._  Just fucking shoot him  _already._

 

 

  
They cannot legally arrest this guy unless a deal is explicitly made. However, when Missy holds her hand out expectantly, he looks at her palm and says, “After. I’m good for it. Right, Della?” He is talking to one of the other girls, who hums out an agreement.

Missy kind of freezes for a moment as she frantically thinks. At the fucking very least, she knows that screaming out that she’s not a cop is not the right thing to do here.

“Is there a problem?” He is looking at her — and his eyes are narrowing.

She shakes her head. Her heart starts to pound. There is a gun tucked in the room. She didn’t think this would go in this direction. She says to him, “No problem at all,” as her bare legs start pushing her body down the dingy hallway. She can hear him following her from behind.

 

 

  
Once they start to process him — which, unbelievably, this is the very first time he’s been arrested and  _he can’t wait_  to tell his parents all about it — they ask for his identification. He pulls out his wallet and hands it over. And then the fucking mall cops go away to tinker at a computer for a while.

And then they come back real fast. They look kind of distraught. And then they tell him they have to call their sergeant.

Grey is like, “Oh, shit, am I about to get special treatment? Y’all are  _corrupt.”_

And one of the guys — this bulky white guy with tan hair — actually pleads with him. Officer MacMillan is actually like, “Can you please be quiet? Just . . . don’t talk, Mr. Torgo.” He is trying to give Grey a helpful tip. Because whatever Grey says can be used against him in a court of law. Like, that isn’t a joke.

 

 

  
Her heart is slamming in her throat as the door to the room gets shut. She has not gotten this far with a mark ever. Possibly in a past life, she might have ruined this a little bit by trying to press him to announce that he wants a blow job, for fifty please. But tonight, she keeps her mouth relatively shut.

A part of her anticipates him like, accosting her right away, so she is mildly surprised when he softly asks, “What happened to your face? Who hit you?”

 

 

  
After the mall cops talk to their boss, they tell Grey that they are going to let him off with a warning because his record is unblemished, and it would be a shame to mar it. They tell him that they can’t let him get into a car and drive though — because he has been drinking. They ask him if there is someone he can call to come and pick him up and ensure that he isn’t rowdy in public for the rest of the night.

Grey thinks that holy shit, this might the very first time in life he has actually blatantly benefited from privilege.

It feels so fucking wrong and weird.

As he starts making his calls on his cellphone, it gets kind of embarrassing. Because — okay — he realizes that he actually doesn’t have any fucking real friends. Because he calls Daario — nothing. He calls Yaya — nothing. He calls Yara — nada. He calls Dany — that bitch without any honor — nothing. He even fucking calls Missandei, that fucking narc probably — and  _nothing._  All of the motherfuckers who are supposed to be his ride or dies are just —

Oh shit. So he remembers now. They are all working right now.

So he calls Theon, as the mall cops just stand around like sentinels, just like, guarding him now? He doesn’t even fucking know. He is eyeing his new friend, MacMillan, wondering if maybe he should just fucking admit to MacMillan that he has no fucking friends, and he’s gonna need a ride home actually.

Theon picks up though. And so Grey quietly says into the phone, “Yo, you need to come get me at the police station.”

And then after a long pause, one in which Theon is just asking a lot of questions and then making a lot of excuses for why he can’t fucking help a pal out, Grey is finally like, “Are you fucking  _serious_  right now,  _Theon!_  Just fucking take a valium and get into your fucking car —”

And then he casts a glance at the MacMillan. Holy shit, not amused at all.

Into the phone, Grey is like, “No, I’m joking. Don’t do that.”

 

 

  
A good lie is an inversion of the truth. A good lie butts up closely to the truth, so that there are fewer details that need to be tracked and managed. This is why she softly tells him that a guy hit her.

“One of your other clients?” he asks.

“No,” she says.

“Ah,” he says, reading between the lines. “It’s never right to hit a girl,” he adds in an apparent show of disgust. “Why did he hurt you?”

“We were arguing,” she says. “He wants me to quit my job — not  _this_  job — my day job — sort of. I actually volunteer and teach music at a preschool. But he — he was saying that it’s a waste of time, and I should just give it up. The fight kind of got out of hand.”

She is saying this because she saw a scraggly line of black marker dragged down his jeans when he came in. He has a young child.

 

 

  
They are in the midst of dinner and trying to get Little Sam to eat all of his peas when Sam’s work phone buzzes. Sam exchanges a look with his wife — he frowns because it is not a regular occurence, for this phone to ring after hours. Gilly glances at the clock on the wall — this cat clock with a swinging tail that sways with each second. She has to leave the house in twenty minutes if she is going to make her group.

Sam says, “Sorry, Gilly,” as he reaches for his phone.

 

 

  
They start just talking. He sits down on the bed and leaves a little bit of room for her. She didn’t anticipate this level of close contact or this kind of intimacy whatsoever, but she sits down next to him anyway. Her gun is tucked between the pad and the bed frame.

She tells him about how she wanted to be a dancer when she was a young girl — but her body type was all wrong — and she might not actually be a gifted dancer, actually. She tells him she still dances sometimes.

With a laugh, he tells her that he used to want to be a pilot — but he’s actually very much afraid of heights.

She lightly asks him what he does for work these days, if it’s not piloting airplanes.

He tells her that he is a businessman. He buys and sells product.

She teases him — or she tries to — she tells him that product is pretty vague. Is it something she would like? Is it like, goods from overseas? Like, she has a friend who buys and sells women’s handbags. Is it that?

He looks into her face and carefully brushes some of her curls away, as he tells her that it’s definitely not stuff for the likes of her. He tells her that she is actually very pretty.

He asks her, “How much for an hour again?”

She says, “One hundred.”

He asks, “And how much for anal?”

“Fifty on top.”

“Fifty?”

“On top of a hundred.”

He sighs — kind of wistfully. And then he says, “I think I’ll stick with the BJ.”

“For just fifty?”

“Yes, a blowjob for fifty.”

Then, Missandei makes the signal.

 

 

  
It takes Sam about thirty minutes before he makes it down to the station. When he leaves the house, he tells Gilly he wouldn't be leaving her in the lurch like this if it wasn’t an emergency. She presses her lips tightly together — because she has some bitter words about his job and how his job treats and pays him on the tip of her tongue. Sam ends up promising her that he will be as fast as humanly possible. She tells him not to speed — to be careful. Because they have a child now.

When Grey sees Sam’s concerned face break into the station, Grey calmly clears his throat. He is like, “Okay, so it’s not what you’re thinking.”

Sam is shaking his head. Because this person is just trying  _so hard_  to make Sam  _give up hope_  in him, and that is just something so terrible and sad. Sam says, “What am I thinking, Grey?”

“That I’m having a mental break.”

Sam is tired — of all of this. Of this labor-intensive, emotional back and forth. He stiffly says, “That’s not what I’m thinking at all.”

“Oh.”

 

 

  
So, right before the room floods with her team members, her mark figures out that he has been betrayed — and his first move is to reach for his gun.

She slides off the bed and shoves her hand under the pad and feels for her gun, grabbing it on the first pass because she has practiced this a thousand times.

She is on a knee. The safety is off, the gun is cocked, she has the barrel aimed at center mass. She shouts, “Put your hands up! Put your hands up or I will shoot!”

His hands go over his head as the door to the room flies open. Robb is first to rush in. And then Yara.

Missandei clicks the safety back on — and then exhales.

 

 

  
Sam does not have time to drop Grey off at home. He explains that his wife has a meeting to go to — she is a counselor at a women’s safety center. His wife works at night because they have their group meetings at night — so that the women can work during the day. Sam tells Grey that they have to go back to Sam’s house and take over with the baby so that his wife can go to work. She is already late.

Grey feels like utter fucking scum when he learns this. He says, “I’m sorry, Sam.”

Sam lives in a modest and cute rambler with a lawn that has not been cut in what looks like months. Grey silently trudges behind Sam, making his way up the skinny little walkway, to the front stoop.

Sam’s wife is holding their baby on her hip, waiting expectantly in the entryway.

“Gilly, this is Grey,” Sam says, making a grab for the baby.

Again, Grey says, “I am  _so sorry.”_

And rather than throw his shitbaggery back into his face, because that’s what he’d do if he were in her position, Gilly actually says, “Nice to meet you, Grey. I’m glad you’re okay. Sam was worried about you.” And then turning to her husband, she says, “Little Sammy hasn’t poo’d yet.”

“Okay.”

 

 

  
Missandei kind of feels like she’s in a rap video. She kind of feels like someone should be fucking spraying champagne in her face and cleavage right now.

She is  _buzzing_  the entire drive back to campus. She is trying not to smile too widely, because it probably looks totally batshit insane, to be so happy over almost getting shot on the job and over successfully getting a man to offer her a very modest amount of money for a sex act that she finds to be completely disgusting when done with a complete stranger!

“You’re a fucking champion,” Alayaya says quietly, her nylon jacket rustling a little bit as she adjusts herself in the driver’s seat.

When they're back at headquarters, as Missy’s pulling her stuff out of her locker and checks her phone for the first time  _in hours_  — she sees that she has a missed call from him — and her face goes warm — and it glows against the screen.

He didn’t leave a message. So she calls him back right away.

 

 

 

 


	8. Missy and Grey get interrogated

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy is really feeling herself after her work win, so she treats herself to an interview with internal affairs. Drogo has very few friends right now, and it bums him out. Sam proves he deserves a better salary. Grey continues having a really shit time at work and thinks about just throwing in the towel, but wait, his current stalker/future love of his life is ready to cheer him up by making moves!

 

 

She stands up immediately when the door to the conference room opens. She brushes her hand over the front of her slacks. She specifically dressed herself extra professionally today. Two men walk in. Both older.

Introductions get made. She is told that one is Jorah and the other is Davos. She is told that they are here to look into an incident that was reported on her behalf, against . . . “Nudho Torgo?”

They actually know who Grey is. They are just uncertain of the name pronunciation.

“Um, Torgo Nudho,” she corrects — for what reason she _does not even know._ “You are supposed to say the family name first, in-language.”

Jorah clears his throat. He says, “Yes, of course. Torgo Nudho.”

“That’s going to get confusing,” Davos cuts in. “We should say his name like how it’s normally said — first name first. Last name last.”

 

 

  
She spends about forty-five minutes with the internal affairs guys. She basically just repeats herself a lot because they keep asking her the same questions a lot, trying to catch an inconsistency in her retelling.

When they gesture to the bruise on her face and ask how she got it, she tells them that she was hit in the face because she asked to be hit in the face.

This sounds utterly crazy to Davos, who is like, “Dear, why in the world would you ask to be hit in the face?”

She has to detail them her work performance issues — which is no longer embarrassing because she is now _murdering it_ at work in large part due to Grey’s advice. She tells them about how she was put on a performance improvement plan, which led her to seek guidance and help from many sources. She tells them that she went to Grey because of course she did. He has such rich and specific experience and expertise, especially in leading teams and entire operations. She tells them that he gave her a number of pointers — illuminated many areas that can be quickly improved and flagged a few areas that will take time to build up.

She tells them that Grey also conveyed to her that she was approaching the work in the wrong way. He suggested that she alter her persona to something better suited to her natural talents and personality, so that she would not have to keep track of too many identity pieces. He conveyed to her that looking like a victim of abuse would be an easy and convincing way of circumventing the need to build context and identity verbally or physically, as that is not currently her strength. He conveyed to her that this was something easy she can do in the meantime, while she strengthens her weaknesses.

“And then after you agreed with all of this — you allowed him to hit you?” Jorah asks. He, too, is pretty thrown by this entire thing.

“Yes,” Missandei says. “He clarified repeatedly, if it was what I wanted from him. I said repeatedly, that yes, it was what I wanted.”

 

 

  
Grey is actually waiting outside of the room when she is done with her interview. He is waiting for his turn. He is wearing a suit and tie. He is being good and obedient because he is still reeling from the humiliation of being a fucking utter mess in front of someone whose respect he didn’t even know he cared about, what the fuck?

Missandei is not really expecting to run into him — her attacker — like this. It doesn’t occur to her how bananas it is, for the scheduler and for her employer to not really consider how traumatizing it could be to run into her attacker like this. Instead, when she sees him, her face just cracks into the softest, shyest, most bashful smile.

She can feel it. And she is still blissed out on her fucking recent win, so she feels like she’s on top of a mountain that she climbed. She feels like she wrestled a four-hundred-pound gorilla to the ground. She feels like she can do _anything_ right now. She feels like she can leap across two tall buildings like how they do in movies and not go splat and die. She feels like she can fly through glass in a high-speed chase and not go splat and die. She feels like she can _totally_ make this guy have a meal with her.

She has this very vague awareness — that she is starting to crush a little bit. She has the vague awareness that it’s totally ridiculous on paper. He hit her in the face — she got hit with feelings. It is like, so stupid. But he is _really_ cool.

Grey actually has no idea why this fucking lunatic is looking at him like he is a puppy that she wants to steal. He is actually very worried about his job. And himself. He is worried everyone is right, and he is fucking very wrong. He is worried that he’s like every fucking insane person in a movie who doesn’t think they are insane, only to realize at the very fucking end that their entire life was a fucking figment of their imagination. He feels like Jim Carey when Jim Carey learned that his entire life was a fucking lie and he was living in a reality show. Grey is really worried about fucking getting drunk and then getting arrested — because that’s really not something he does every day. It’s actually not something he does, _ever._ He is really worried about getting fired because he has no fucking other talent or skill in life. His skill is gruesome. It is lying and manipulating and sometimes, it is killing. Like, is he going to become a fucking school teacher after this like his folks? Is he going to fucking teach fucking children math after this?

He is worried about gaining a reputation as the _crazy guy without a penis_ — and so he doesn’t get why this woman is just constantly _looking at him_ like _this_ now. He is worried that his reputation is true — that maybe he is actually fucking insane now.

“Hey!” Missy says brightly. “How are you? I saw that you called last night.” He never answered her return calls. She optimistically figured that he was probably sleeping or busy because _nothing_ can get her down right now!

She is currently blocking the doorway to the conference room. Everyone around them is watching — they are watching and waiting to see if Grey is going to punch Missandei in the face randomly for fun, probably.

Grey can see Seaworth and Mormont just waiting to interview his fucking ass until it bleeds to death. But okay, he supposes he can kill some time talking to the woman he apparently assaulted and has apparently Stockholm-Syndromed accidentally.

He mutters, “Yeah, I forgot you were working. I just had something come up.”

“Oh, and you wanted to like, chat about it?”

“Missandei, I’m late for my interrogation.” He makes a motion like he is trying to part the sea. “Can you like, let me through?”

 

 

  
By now — and clearly because of the internal affairs involvement — everyone pretty much knows that Grey was the one who beat Missandei’s face in. That is the gossip of the day. No one knows that Grey was arrested though. That bit of news managed to fly under everyone’s radar.

Yara throws up her arms when she makes the connection and says, “Of course! Duh!” and then she continues going about her day.

What is less clear is the fact that Drogo sold Grey out. What is also less clear is that Missandei _wasn’t_ the one who sold Grey out.

This is why Sandor, Bronn, and maybe a few others get a little bit curt with her in team meeting because they believe in loyalty and honor. Sandor’s not outrightly an ass to her, but he refuses to look her in the face and he says only three words to her because he doesn’t think it’s honorable for her to solicit help from Grey and sell him up the fucking river just because she is ambitious.

Then there is Robb who, like Drogo, doesn’t think Grey should have hit her at all. And it’s not because she’s a woman. It’s because they shouldn’t hit each other, and Missandei is very new and impressionable. Like, it is up to all of them as a team to guide her and teach her and keep her safe.

Missandei is pissed at Drogo again. There is that one area of darkness in her victory lap. He said hello to her in the morning. He also said good job last night. It was really immature, but she just gave him the cold shoulder. She just stared at him for a beat and then said nothing.

She is annoyed that Drogo is _such_ a fucking asshole. She loves his hypocrisy. She loves that all he thinks she can be good at is being a fake hooker. She loves that he’s been riding her ass and making her feel terrible for not being good in this very narrow box that he put her in. She loves that he thinks she is such a fucking weak woman. She loves that this fucking asshole didn’t even _talk to her_ about this before he tattled on her behalf. She really loves that he went off and is trying to get her branded as a _difficult bitch_ so that no one will want to work with her ever again. She loves that Drogo is trying to get his BFF _fired,_ because it’s not like Grey hasn’t like, gone through _a lot_ already.

 

 

  
Grey is not certain what Missandei said to the internal affairs guys — whether or not she demonized him, covered for him, or just told the truth about him. She was right when she told him that he actually doesn’t know her well enough at all.

Barring certainty, he just has to tell the truth. Because if caught in a lie, then he will be real fucked and most definitely fired.

So he tells Davos and Jorah that she came to him for help and advice because she was struggling in the field. Initially, he wanted to dissuade her from trying to improve because he heard about her performance informally, and she sounded like she was severely underperforming, which is concerning. He just wanted to get through to her and make her understand that she needed to quit because she was putting everyone’s lives, including her own, at risk. They had an argument about that. She conveyed to him that she didn’t want to quit, that she was determined to improve.

He egged her on and tried to get her to hit him, to test her mettle. The whole thing just got out of hand. Also, honestly, she was also just being really annoyingly short-sighted, and he was pushing her for that reason — because she was annoying him. He realizes he made an error in judgement here. He says that this kind of hazing is pretty common in their work and in team-building, but he understands that it’s inappropriate and unprofessional. He understands there are better ways to teach people than to push.

At this point, Grey is not even bothering to manipulate the situation much. He feels pretty down on himself. He is pretty fucking tired of fighting against the current — of fighting against apathy and against people who don't want him anymore.

So maybe this will just be the end and he will just leave and go do something else — like what his parents want for him.

Maybe he will work a normal office job and learn a new skill — and maybe he will eventually meet someone who won’t recoil away in horror and disgust over what happened to him — and then maybe he can spend his weekends having barbeques and talking about fixing the roof — and repeat that until he is fucking old and frail and just fucking die with his fucking boring wife by his side, having done _nothing_ of significance at all.

 

 

  
Davos and Jorah are pretty old-school. Davos and Jorah used to work in the field, back when there was only one woman in the field — and she got a divorce and developed a substance abuse problem for many reasons — but mostly because this job is especially hard for women.

They understand hazing. It used to be much worse back in the day. Now, the conversations and the attitudes are much more different.

They also understand that there are complicated middle grounds, and that the organization has become more and more rigid and process-oriented as the years have progressed — that there is just not enough room left for their people to breathe sometimes.

So the incident gets closed pretty quickly — because the ‘victim’ here refuses to press charges or put in a formal complaint. She also avidly believes that she was not a victim of assault. So there’s not much they can do — to _make_ someone lodge a formal charge. It would actually mean way more work for them, to press her do that. Davos just wants to do his job well, as expected. He does not want to make waves because that’s stupid and he’s not a hot-headed kid anymore. Jorah thinks there is something a little off about this entire thing, but maybe he is colored by what happened to Grey. He decides that most of it is normal. He also just wants to do his job well, and as expected.

Jorah writes up the report fairly quickly — by end of day — and sends it to Daenerys while also copying Missandei’s supervisor.

 

 

  
Missy is reapplying her tinted lip balm in the women’s toilets when the email comes through on her phone. The email is from Dany, stating that the matter has been closed. Grey will be put on one day of leave, without pay. The consequence of what he did is minor on purpose, but they have to _do something._ He really _did_ hit a colleague while on campus. Whether he had Missandei’s consent or not, that is not something they condone. So he has to be disciplined.

Grey is at his computer and at his desk when the email comes through. He reads it despondently. His heart throbs a little harder when he reads it.

 

 

  
When Grey runs into Drogo — it’s clear it’s on purpose — because Drogo actually corners him in the hallway and grabs his arm.

Which Grey yanks away. And just to be mean, he says, “Don’t touch me. I’m not giving you consent to touch me.”

Drogo’s face falls. He looks like he’s just been punch in the face. Drogo says, “I’m so _sorry.”_

And Grey doesn’t understand how Drogo can act so butt-hurt when Grey was the one who got made an example of because of shit Drogo did.

And there are lots of things Grey would say to Drogo, if he even had any fucks left to give. He would say that he thought they were friends, like at one point, Drogo called Grey his best friend. And that was probably qualified under the umbrella of work, but _still._ It sort of meant _something_ to Grey, to feel that Drogo was in his corner, trying to get him back in the field. It meant something to him, that Drogo was the _one person_ who believed him and didn’t treat him like an idiot child, when he told every other asshole that he is _fine._

Well, that was fucking stupid of him. Of course Drogo is not in his corner. Of course Drogo looks down on him and pities him, like the rest of them do. Grey is realizing that his judgement is just _off_ right now, and he doesn't see other people for what they actually are at all.

Drogo says, “ You know why I did it, right? Maybe we should talk.”

Grey is walking off. He is walking away. He says, “Nah, I’m good, man.”

 

 

  
He doesn’t have an appointment, so he anticipates that this might just be terrible timing — that maybe Sam is busy with another looney tunes former field agent who lost his dick on the job through a terrible ‘accident’ and Grey is just going to feel embarrassed when he knocks on the door and someone else already has Sam’s time and attention.

But actually, Sam is alone, at his desk looking over his notes.

Grey clears his throat get Sam’s attention. He says, “Hey, you busy?”

 

 

  
They are outside, circumnavigating the pond like how Sam likes to, when Grey apologizes — again — for making Sam come to the police station to retrieve him when Sam had responsibilities to his family and was off the clock. Grey thanks Sam — again — for covering for his ass and for not reporting the incident, because if leadership knew about it, his ass would get canned so fucking fast. Grey says, “I know that I put you in a really tough position. I’m sorry for that.”

“I’m not going to report you on that ever,” Sam says mildly. “You can relax. I understand the circumstances around that. You don’t have to keep working me.”

Grey stops momentarily. He is frowning. He says, “I’m not trying to _work_ you right now. I honestly just feel terrible. I honestly just feel guilt.”

 

 

  
They end up spending an hour outside, before the end of the work day. Grey thinks it’s so weird and awful, that this thing they have going is so one-sided. All they ever talk about is him. They never talk about Sam and whatever Sam’s shit is.

When Grey calls attention to this, Sam kind of smiles. He tells Grey that it’s not really appropriate for them to be friends. There are professional boundaries for a reason — and it’s so Sam can help Grey to the very best of his abilities. Sam says that he wants to do that, very much.

Grey tells Sam that he’s being put on administrative leave. Sam says, “I know. One day.”

Grey says, “It’s not the length of time. It’s — the punitive nature of it.”

“Grey, you hit someone at work,” Sam says gently.

“And work also sent her off to lure in armed criminals through sex work.” And then Grey sighs. He says, “I know. I know. I’m not trying to justify what I did — honest. And I’m not saying that it’s an eye for an eye. I’m just saying . . . I just feel so frustrated.”

Grey blandly tells Sam that he’s been thinking about quitting. He’s been thinking a lot about everything, and maybe it’s time to cut his losses — and he’s amassed so many _losses_ already. Maybe it’s time to just fucking call it.

He tells Sam he’s kind of losing respect for himself. He sacrificed a lot for the job — like time with his family, having a personal life, having real friends, his fucking _body_ and, some days, his sanity — and what is it even for?

He tells Sam that some days, it feels like there’s nobody that cares about him or even knows him at all. And that is fine — it used to be fine with him. But today, it just feels like a _grind._  
  
He tells Sam that maybe he’s just so afraid to move on because he’s afraid that if he tries to be something else, someone else — he will find that he is no good at it, because he has just been _wrecked_ by this job. He speculates that this is why people stay in abusive relationships. It’s just easier to stay with what is known rather than risk and venture into the unknown.

“What do you like about field work?” Sam asks, during a lull.

“It’s the most direct way that I feel like I’m helping people,” Grey says. “I don’t feel like I’m helping anyone at a desk, looking at reports and numbers.”

“Why do you like helping people?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Grey says. “I just do. I could tell you a bunch of shit about my family — but you already know about that. I could tell you a bunch of shit about the outcomes of past work — but that’s just — that’s not why. I just don’t know. I just do.”

 

 

  
It’s half past five when he finally makes his way up to the garage and to his car. When he spots her leaning against his vehicle, waiting for him, he is like, oh my God, _again?_ He squares his shoulders unconsciously, like he is worried he’s going to have to fight her and get into even more trouble, as he walks up to her.

He says, _“Hey,”_ with a lot of suspicion.

She pushes herself off of his car. She softly says, “Hi. You headed out?”

She is still blocking the driver’s side door. Nevertheless, he still says, “Yeah, I’m headed out for the day.”

“I wasn’t the one who logged that bullshit,” she states. “I’m really sorry about everything though. You don’t deserve it.”

“I know you didn’t do it,” he mutters, skipping over everything else she said. “It was Drogo.” He tries to nudge his way to his door. He mutters, “Don’t even worry about it.”

She gently says, “Okay, I won’t,” her voice lilting up.

And then as he’s fiddling with his keys and trying to balance his bag and his coat in his arms and hands, he feels her reaching out, touching his knuckles with her fingertips — and then he feels her warm hand palming his car keys out of his grasp.

She is staring at him steadily as she presses the unlock button. His car quietly beeps.

And he actually groans. Because this energy that she keeps bringing to their interactions is _fucking ridiculous._

If he didn’t fucking know any better, he would think that she is doing what it _feels like_ she is doing. If he didn’t fucking know any better, he would think that she _doesn’t_ know that his genitals are a _fucking mess._ If he didn’t know any better, he’d think that she was trying to _fuck with him_ just for her own amusement — but instead, she is just staring at him with such fucking hope in her fucking eyes.

She smiles a little bit. And then she just says, “Have dinner with me,” as her gaze continues just pressing into his. “Seriously. We _don’t_ work together. You’re in an entirely different wing of the building. We can — we can — just _please_ have dinner with me.”

She is totally internally freaking out. Her outsides might be somewhat calm and collected, but her inside is screaming out in self-consciousness and fear. She is scared he’s going to use his brain and pick out something to say that will devastate her. Like, he might tell her that she is reading this entire thing wrong between them and he’s actually disgusted by her, not interested — like, get it straight. Like, he might tell her that he would never be interested in her in a million years, because she is just so unremarkable and boring and remedial at her job. Like, he might just insult her body and say that he is just not attracted to it because he doesn’t think it’s sexy enough.

As she freaks out internally over the longest pause in the history of all pauses, he groans again — in disbelief and maybe also in exasperation. He says, “Your _face,_ Missandei.”

That face that he is referring to constricts out a bigger smile — and it’s gorgeous and bright and light and real — and it just generally guts him on the inside. She says, “Yeah, I know — _you_ did this,” as she softly laughs.

“I like to think that _we_ did it,” he quietly quips.

 _“Together,”_ she supplies.

And then he sighs loudly. “Why _dinner?”_ he asks.

“Why _not_ dinner?” she answers. And then a little bit of her bravado shakes. She feels vulnerable and self-conscious as she adds, “I just want to get to know you better.”

He looks . . . a little panicked actually. He asks, “Are you like — are you asking me —”

“Yes,” she interjects quickly, to put them both of out of their misery. “I’m asking you out on a date.”

“Oh,” he says. And then after another pause, he says, _“Fuck.”_

She blinks. “Fuck?” she says with uncertainty.

And then — really reluctantly and with his pulse hammering in his head — he tells her that he’s about to be cleared by Tarly. Tarly is about to recommend that he get put back into the field because they are optimistic that he is ready. Tarly says that he is professionally confident that Grey is ready. It’s this deep show of trust and stuff, because he’s been ranting on and on a lot about how nobody trusts him anymore. Tarly is gonna go out on a bit of limb for him. Tarly is writing up the recommendation to leadership like, right now. Right as they are speaking, right now.

Grey says, “Um, yeah. So. Yeah.” He swallows the lump in his throat. He says, “It’s really, um, flattering that you — that you —” He clears his throat, coughing out some discomfort. “Um, you seem like a really . . . neat person. But um — ah — you know? I’m like, um — we’re going to be colleagues.”

“Oh,” she says, breathing it out. “Oh. Yeah! So wow! So — so you’re coming back!” She blinks rapidly. “That’s . . . great! We’re gonna work together! That’s so crazy! And . . . great! We’re colleagues! Like, for real now!” She’s now nodding vigorously. “I know that you’ve been really wanting to come back for a long time now. Wow!” She blows out an exhale. “Congrats! Grey! I’m so happy for you!”

 

 

 


	9. Grey and Missy are just colleagues

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy and Grey embark on a new era as colleagues. Grey gets pushed to the bottom of the ladder because leadership still doesn't think he's sane enough to do anything of substance. He has a good attitude about it. Missy makes it out of her PIP intact, yay! She is totally NOT crushing on the future love of her life at all. She is totally over it and him!

 

 

  
After a lot of deep thought and a few sleepless nights, Sam decides that he has to relinquish his control over Grey. Control is not really the word Sam would prefer to use, but Grey has made it clear that it’s how he feels about this.

And if what Sam speculates is true — that Grey suffers from depression and anxiety tied to his self worth and body image, that Grey no longer trusts the people in his life to show up for him or to support and care for him so he pushes people away and holds them at a distance subconsciously and consciously — then continuing to force Grey to go to therapy and dangle the carrot of field work is, at best, coercive, and at worst, irrecoverably damaging.

So Sam writes up the letter, fills out the paperwork, makes the recommendation, and essentially lets Grey go as Sam urgently hopes that he is doing the right thing here. So much of the work is unclear and uncertain, just like so much of life is unclear and uncertain. Sam wishes to God that he doesn’t later learn that Grey gets hurt, or worse yet, gets killed on the job because he went into the field too early.

But, Sam knows, Grey is right. It _is_ dehumanizing to constantly be told about his own mental state by people who are not living in his mind.

Even though Sam’s door is always open, a part of him doesn’t expect to see Grey again because Grey has made it clear, how he feels about therapy. There is also that part of Sam that wonders if he just got played by a hyper-intelligent individual who was trained to manipulate and lie to people.

So Sam is mildly surprised — but very happily so — when Grey faithfully knocks on the door at eleven.

Sam says, “Come in.”

 

 

  
Grey doesn’t bother easing into it. He throws some sunflower seeds at the shyest, ugliest little duck hiding behind his mother, making it get swarmed by all the popular ducks, and then he tells Tarly that Missandei asked him out — like, on a date. And it was really weird because he didn’t think that she felt that way or saw him in that way at all — the weird part for him is that he didn’t anticipate it or see it coming. Usually, he can pick out these things.

Grey doesn’t voice out loud, all of the obsessive paranoid thoughts he’s been circling around in regard to his dick situation — like maybe she’s a creepy fetishist, like maybe she is asexual but not aromantic, like maybe she fell and bonked her head on a boulder and just forgot about his situation, like maybe he is a fucking idiot who is getting far too ahead of himself because all she fucking did was just asked him to go to _one dinner_ with her, holy fuck.

Sam’s head swings back in surprise at this new development. He asks, “What did you say in response to her asking you out on a date?”

“What do you think I said?” Grey mutters, chucking more seeds at the wallflower bird, who is being a dope and just running away from the incoming pellets. “I said no thanks ‘cause I ain’t letting no hot bitch ruin my fucking life and all I’ve worked for just because I think she smells nice.”

“Wow. I hope you didn’t actually say that to her,” Sam says, sounding altogether too earnest, like he just met Grey yesterday.

“Nah,” Grey corrects anyway, even though he knows Sam is not new. “I actually said it very nicely and very, very awkwardly. I actually just told her you’re clearing me to go back into the field, and — you know — there’s that no fraternization policy. I’m by the book now. No hitting people I work with. No . . . fraternizing with people I work with.”

“I’m sorry, Grey,” Sam says.

“Why?” Grey says. “I’m going back in the field. I’m ecstatic, man.”

“I mean about Missandei. It seems like the two of you have really made a special connection recently.”

“Oh,” Grey says. “Nah. It’s cool. It’s not that special. And she didn’t like, _die._ We’re still buds and stuff. I’m probably gonna see her more often than I currently do. I’m sure I’ll get my fill of her Missandei-esque shit soon enough.”

And then, after a bit of companionable silence — one in which Sam refrains from saying _a lot_ of the things that he wants to say to Grey about Grey’s fear of intimacy — Sam opts to keep it simple. He knocks Grey lightly, shoulder to shoulder. He teasingly says, “You think she smells nice, huh?”

“Oh my God, shut up,” Grey says immediately. “It was a figure of speech.”

“No, it’s actually not.”

 

 

  
It takes Grey more than two weeks to get fully transferred back over. He doesn’t know why it’s taking so long and no one really has answers for him.

He is not getting reinstated back into his old position. Drogo now occupies it, for one. For another, leadership does not think he is ready to handle the stress and responsibility. This is not explicitly said to him as much as he has to optimistically infer it when he learns he’s getting demoted. Like, by a lot. Currently, it doesn’t bother him as much as it could. He is just _fucking happy_ he is going back into the field, so they can put him in his place however they fucking want. He will gladly go along with it.

And they kind of do put him in his place. It’s been a while since he’s done this sort of work. Due to the accident that he and Theon suffered, a lot of protocols and processes have been changed and updated, to ensure that such an accident wouldn’t ever happen again. Grey has to go through training again. It is like the last ten, eleven years of his life and his accomplishments have been erased.

After his transfer is finally blessed, he says bye to Stannis who is like, oh, you’re leaving? — and then Grey steals back his peace lily because he’s no longer ticked off at Missandei. He shows up to his new-old department with the plant tucked underneath his arm, to a roomful of applause as the other trainees look on in benign confusion.

“Oh my God, _stop,”_ he says.

 

 

  
It’s pretty comical to the other agents, that Grey has to go through training again, but he’s actually being a really good sport about it — to the surprise of many. He gets partnered with Podrick and everyone initially feels sorry for Pod — the trainees who don’t know who Grey is feel pretty glad they didn’t get stuck with the old guy, and the ones who have heard of him feel bad that Pod got stuck with Mr. Walking Trauma. Some of the trainees start quietly muttering that about him behind his back as a joke. And when he overhears it one day, he freaks them all out by saying, “Oh, that’s very funny. That’s slightly better than Mr. Dickless.”

He knows that most of them will be flushed out within months.

To him, training feels like it lasts forever. But really, the type of training he has to go through again lasts four weeks. In those four weeks, he is real fucking bored and real fucking unimpressed with the new protocols and how much reporting they have to do now, so he distracts himself by teaching and mentoring Pod, who is a good sport and who is _really_ obedient.

Grey starts to remember just how much he loves this part of the job, being part of a team, helping other people learn so that they can work better together, making decisions of substance.

Grey kind of assumed he’d fall back into some old dynamics, like Daario would say something dumb and Grey would sardonically correct Daario. But now, when Daario says something dumb and Grey sardonically corrects, there is awkward silence.

Selmy keeps looking at him with sad eyes, because Selmy also thinks it’s too soon for Grey to be back in the field. Selmy actually has a lot of new fears about his people now, fears that weren’t there before what happened to Grey. So Grey’s presence is exacerbating certain things for Barristan.

Drogo is now Grey’s boss. And that is perfectly fine. Grey currently has no problem with Drogo leading. He hasn’t actually been put in the field yet, so time will tell how he responds to Drogo calling shots. For now, he is cordial and polite and full of yessirs. The professionalism is really throwing Drogo, who also keeps looking at Grey with sad eyes, because this dynamic is probably not what either of them anticipated, when Grey came back.

Tyrion is actually the first one who treats him normally. Tyrion purposefully stands on a chair to ruffle Grey’s shaved head at the first team meeting. Tyrion says, “Great to have you back, you little rapscallion.”

 

 

  
Missy generally felt ultra humiliated for about three days or so, after Grey rejected her advances, citing work reasons. Her mind played tricks on her and told her that he was just using work as an excuse, and he wouldn’t ever go on a date with her in any universe. Her mind started to convince her that he is kind of out of her league, so that was a stupid flight of fancy that she had. Her mind embarrassed her, telling her that it was ridiculous that she thought a few flirty moments could be parlayed into what? Weekends at farmers markets? Was she going to spend her week playing hooker and then go home and be like, “Honey, what do you want for dinner?”

She is pretty much over her crush on him when he finally does manage to make it into their secure segment of the building. He looks fresh. Like, clean and well-rested. And that’s cool. Good for him.

The lily that she gave him sits on the corner of his desk. It sits on a plate that collects water run-off. Every time she walks by his desk, she faithfully thinks that she’s a fucking moron, and that was such a stupid gift to give a grown man who would end up being her officemate.

So she settles into work. The bruise on her face fades quickly, but work is still clicking along. Her PIP is over. Drogo can go fuck himself because she nailed it, but also, she deserved to be put in that position because she really was underperforming. So it seems like everything happened as it should. Drogo is still her supervisor.

In the locker room, Missy shoves her hand into her bra cups and lifts her boobs — not to make them more appealing, but because her nipples were sitting too low in her bra. She checks her gun before tucking it away under her jacket. It is too hot to convincingly wear a jacket, so she will be taking that off later and just going bare — which is really nerve-wracking but _oh well._ Such is the life of a fake prostitute.

 

 

  
It’s almost two months before they actually work together for real. He’s doing surveillance in the car with Alayaya, listening in. He listens as she switches back and forth between Low Valyrian and the Common Tongue, as she lays out terms to johns about how much the various kinds of sex cost.

Johns never really really get charged, and the predatory massage and spa owners that do are often from the community that they are preying on. This is why Missandei is on the ground now. It is because she perfectly fits the profile — racially, ethnically, culturally — of a human trafficking victim.

Trafficking is hard to prove, and it’s hard to charge someone with it, often because women do not testify against abusers. Women fear deportation as well as for the safety of their families back home.

Also, laws are lax. Spa owners often leave jail after only nine months after plea deals even though they originally faced a minimum of four years and a max of thirty-five.

“How much?”

“One hundred for an hour. Four hundred for the whole night. Fifty to get blown.”

“What do I get for the whole night?”

“Whatever you want. Except anal. That is extra fifty.”

“Really?” he balks. “It costs that much?”

 _“Yeah,_ man.”

“Nah, fuck that. Too rich. Sorry sweetheart. Not tonight.”

Missy thinks that she has reached the point where this work is starting to feel repetitive and pointless — but also still pretty terrifying, like she can get sexually assaulted and die at any moment.

 

 

  
As she shuts her locker, she jumps in fright when she sees Yara’s face pop out from behind the door.

Missy is touching her slamming heart with her palm as Yara says, “Heading home? Tired? Wanna grab a nightcap?”

“Ah,” Missy says reluctantly. “I think my dad might be waiting up for me.” Yara often likes to avoid being alone — for various reasons that Missy doesn't know because they aren’t that close — so Yara often asks people to grab drinks after work. Yara drinks _a lot._

“Oh, cool,” Yara says smoothly. “Catch you some other time, then.” And then shouting down the row, Yara says, “Brie! You _ready!_ D and G are waiting, and you know that Grey hates standing around with only his thoughts and Daario to keep him company! Come on!”

Further down the brightly lit room where Brienne’s locker is, she is grumbling and trying to contain her short hair with a tie. She is saying, “Yeah, yeah, just a minute!”

“Hey, actually, on second thought — I could use a drink,” Missy offers.

 

 

  
They can’t and don’t talk much about work — because they are out in public — but they do occasionally make vague statements about certain aspects of work. Like, Alayaya pulls her glass of beer closer, looks around the table, and sardonically says that she can’t help but notice that boss man wasn’t invited. Bronn mutters that no one likes hanging out with the boss during off-hours, after which, Tyrion remarks that he is present. Like, they invited him, didn’t they?

“Oh my God,” Kojja gripes. “You aren’t our boss.”

“Aren’t I though?” Tyrion says, sounding unnecessarily mysterious. “Don’t I kind of outrank you?”

“Oh my God,” Kojja says. “You better shut your mouth before I make you shut it. Rank don’t mean nothing. You’re desk, Tyrion.” She means that he has never been in the field. And she also means that she resents that, while very intelligent and talented, he got his job through family connections. She basically means that he will never be her fucking boss.

“Sour grapes,” he says, holding up his wine glass. He’s been drinking a fair bit — he is a bit tipsy and making dad jokes now. “Grey is here. So I suppose ex-bosses are allowed into the inner sanctum, then?”

 

 

  
As the rest of them lean in toward the center of the table, a bunch of bodies and elbows crammed in tightly in a too-small space, avidly chatting and cracking a number of jokes that she doesn’t get at all, Missy finds herself retreating inward. She finds herself mute again, just awkwardly trying to look alert and attentive as banter gets thrown back and forth and she gets casually ignored because she doesn’t have snappy retorts at the ready like everyone else — sans Brienne — does. Even Brienne fits in though. Even Brienne has enough experience accumulated that she can laugh at a recollection that someone else brings up. Like, she laughs when Bronn brings up that one time she really got under Sandor’s skin by handing his ass to him in hand-to-hand. Even though Brie is laughing, her mouth is saying, “Oh man, that was so _stressful_ for me.”

He is eating a burger. And sitting across the table. So she has a pretty good view of him eating. He is wearing a sweatshirt with a hood and a cap with a bill. This is what he chose to change into once they were off the clock.

He doesn’t pause in his methodical eating. He is not one of those people who coquettishly covers their mouth while they are eating and talking — she is actually one of those people. He just talks out of the side of his mouth as he chews through his food. He just grins with his cheeks stuffed whenever someone says something that he finds funny.

She wonders if this what their hypothetical date would have been like. Like, would he have shown up in super casual wear? Would he have eaten without being encumbered at dinner with her? Would he have been constantly laughing and smiling — but directing all of it at her? Would she even have had the capability of saying something that made him smile?

 

 

  
Some of them have early morning meetings, so drinks fizzle out by nine. She’s had one glass of wine that she twirled and nursed all evening, so she is awkwardly sober and hyper-aware of her shyness as she quietly waves goodbye to her colleagues, explaining her incoming departure by mentioning her dad and how she should probably get home and check in on him.

“You live with your dad?” Grey asks, his face tilting up to look at her because he’s still seated at the table.

“Um, he lives with me. Get it straight.” It flies out of her mouth before she even has a chance to think about her tone.

Her retort actually makes Daario shift in his spot next to Grey, as a smile unexpectedly breaks out across Daario's face. Daario currently finds sassy Missy to be a novelty because it’s not what he expects from her.

“Ah,” Grey says. “My mistake.”

And now . . . it is a touch awkward again.

So she says, “Okay, well, bye!”

“Later, Missandei.”

 

 

  
She tries really hard to sneak in quietly, but it doesn’t matter. Her dad is waiting up for her. He pokes his head out of his downstairs bedroom when he hears the front door open. The house is dark, so he just looks like a moving dark blob to her.

She whispers, “Go back to bed, Dad. Sorry I woke you.”

Equally as quiet, he says, “I was up anyway. How was your night, baby?”

She’s kicking off her shoes — her thick-soled flats — with a hand braced against a wall. She then blinks hard right after her dad flips on the lights in the entryway. She says, “It was good.”

“That’s good,” he says, as his eyes scan over her face and body — that is why he turned on the lights — to check her over for new bruises or other marks of violence that she won’t be able to adequately explain to him. “Work was good?”

“Yeah,” she says, barefoot and a couple inches shorter now. “Work was fine.”

“That’s good, hon.”

 

 

 


	10. Missy and Grey, sitting in a tree

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey tries to hook up with Alayaya because he is making terrible decisions in his personal life right now, right?! He continues telling everyone that he is fine, even though he is clearly not. Missy lets the cat of the bag because she has no chill. The cat is her infatuation with a dude that insists on being purely professional with her. It's okay, though. He's the future love of her life — he just doesn't know it yet!

 

 

  
He ends up drinking way more than he should, way more than he typically does. He makes the decision to go for the fourth and fifth and eighth vodka drink with a drunk person’s logic of, ‘I am totally sober.’ He tells himself he is drinking extra because he is celebrating his first stint back in the field, and celebrating is what normal, well-adjusted people do.

He ends up getting hammered — and by the time it really hits, only he and Alayaya are left at the table, huge and engulfing now that it’s just the two of them. There are littered glasses stacked all in front of their hands.

They aren’t even talking very much with each other, before he looks over, touches the side of her face with his fingertips, and closes the distance in between their mouths.

 

 

  
Due to years of working together closely, a lot of their communication happens wordlessly now. He doesn’t have to ask her much. She doesn’t have to give him options. The kiss is sloppy and way too intentional to be accidental. And they are in a neighborhood bar, close enough to work that any of the people who work at the organization can accidentally see them.

So they settle the bill quickly — finding that Bronn forgot to pay his share — so they split that up too, before she rises from her seat and holds her hand out to him.

She pulls him into a cab and mutters out the address and some sparse directions to her apartment to the driver. She falls back against the seat with a flourish — then she spontaneously cracks up, holding onto her stomach as she rolls back and forth in her seat, knocking into him.

She starts kissing him again after the door to her apartment is shut behind them, this time kissing him comprehensively, with her arms around him and her hips tilted to his.

She is also very, very drunk. Her logic and motivation are currently pretty simple: Sure, she can stand getting laid tonight. Sure, he’s good at sex. Sure, she wouldn’t mind having sex with him again even though it’s been a while and a lot of stuff has happened. Sure, he seems like he needs this. Sure, he’s her friend, and she cares about him as a person. Sure, they can figure how to have sex again, together. It is not going to be a problem for her at all.

She pushes his back against her kitchen counter, as she leans hard into him. She groans before she dips back in, opening her mouth as she runs her mouth against his, tasting booze and salt.

Her hot breath is panting against his cheek as she teasingly tugs at the stretchy waistband of his sweats. Before he can react to that, her hand fully presses to the front of his pants, smearing up and down where his penis used to be.

This is when sobriety hits him like a freight train. This when it just feels _awful_ and vulnerable and just all scary and wrong to him. This is when he realizes that this is just a fucking huge mistake that he’s making — what the fuck is wrong with him? This is when he grabs her wrist to still her hand. And this is when he sighs heavily and gently says, “Hey.”

 

 

  
So she sits him down on her couch, yawning widely. She leans her head against her fist and she says, “Are you okay? Like, really, are you okay?”

He adamantly says he is okay. He is about as okay as can be expected. He says, “I don’t know what everyone is _wanting_ from me.”

“We just want you to be safe and healthy, Grey,” she says.

 

 

  
So she kicks him out of her apartment nicely. It is getting late. She’s drunk. He’s not putting out. He is currently a terrible conversationalist. There’s not much incentive for her to like, be around him right now.

She laughs softly and tiredly at his face, which is mildly perturbed and a little offended.

She snickering as she opens her front door, as she says, “You keep ranting on and telling people that you aren’t an invalid who needs to be treated with little kid gloves — but _now_ you’re all sensitive about getting kicked out because I have no need for you since you’re being a prude? _Pick a lane,_ honey.” She gestures to the exit. Like, he should be taking it right now.

 

 

  
His head is pounding when he shows up to work the next morning. Alayaya looks fresh as hell — smirking at him when she sees his glowering face. She is holding out a cup of fancy coffee for him. She gleefully says, “It’s pourover coffee and —”

“I don’t _give a shit_ what it is,” he mutters, interrupting her even as he makes a grab for the cup. “Thank you.”

As he tilts his head back and starts sucking it down even though it is scalding and it must be just wrecking his throat, she is telling him to slow down and savor the taste, holy shit, rude. She tells him it was expensive — more to irk him than to really make him feel bad over the trouble she went through.

When he’s done, when the cup is mostly empty, he looks at her and he says, “Are we okay?”

She presses her hand to the center of his chest, feeling around for his strong heartbeat. The gesture is intimate-looking enough that Daario takes note, from all the way across the room.

Alayaya says, “Always. We are always okay. Are _you_ okay?”

“Oh my God, how many times?” he gripes. “I’m fucking _fine.”_

 

 

  
So he refrains from telling Sam about what happened — or didn’t happen — with Alayaya. Grey rationalizes that it’s inconsequential, so Sam doesn’t need to hear it. To prove to himself that it’s inconsequential and that he has a host of other traumatic things that ought to be at the forefront of his mind, Grey instead tells Sam this gruesome story of how poor his family and their community was when he was little, so one day he came home from school and he found that some uncles — not his real fucking uncles — snuck into their yard and stole their dog while he was at school. And they killed his dog, roasted his dog, and ate his dog. He was pretty much inconsolable and sobbed his guts out when he found out.

Grey tells Sam, “I don’t think anything else I’ve experienced since has matched the . . . intensity of grief I felt when I was seven years old.”

“You are saying that feels worse than what Ramsay Bolton did?”

“Yes,” Grey says, looking blankly ahead.

Sam can easily pick out that there is something bothering Grey right now — but he’s being characteristically reticent. And characteristically, Sam does not push.

“My parents came home and found me losing my mind,” Grey adds. “My dad went over to talk to those men, but that’s my dad. He’s an _intellectual_ so he _intellectualizes._ Anyway, nothing came of it. The men didn’t see what my problem was because my dog was just an animal and I was just a kid and they were my elders and they were hungry. My dad tried to explain it to me — but you know what I was thinking as my dad was sitting me down?”

“What?”

“That it wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right at all, that my dad didn’t protect me, that I wanted to kill those guys for what they did to my puppy, that I _hated_ how I was made to feel — small and voiceless.”

“And that was why it was easy for us to recruit you,” Sam supplies, looking over to check Grey’s face.

His face is blank — but also grim. He says, “Perhaps.”

 

 

  
Through careful observation, Missy learns that Grey is a habitual feedback-giver. She watches him effortlessly amass supporters and fans among the trainees through his quiet brand of leadership. He softly reminds them to never pick up spent casings during shooting practice for instance, because it’s not good to train the body to do that — because the body is dumb and it _will_ automatically bend down during a real shoot out if it’s been conditioned to do so during practice. That is actually why they all have to practice obsessively like it is a real-life situation.

And the trainees listen to him. They respect him. When asked to pick out the leads during team drills, they always pick Grey without fail. It is only after Drogo tells them they have to stop picking Grey because someone else needs to learn — that they stop picking Grey.

He has been politely asking Drogo when Drogo thinks he might be able to do more than surveillance.

Drogo and Barristan are torn — in difficult positions because their department is currently ultra-scrutinized, in part because of what happened to Grey and Theon. They worry about the optics — what it would look like to drop Grey into work whole-hog after a yearlong sabbatical, after an incident that left three of their people dead and two of them mutilated. Grey was leading that effort, too — and though the investigation cleared him of responsibility for the incident — his name is still attached to one of the most abysmal failures their organization has seen.

And then he came back and was attached to a possible assault allegation, which while he was cleared of it, that is also a blight that leadership currently has a hard time getting over. They do not think he is worth the liability that they are associating with him. They view him as a ticking bomb. They would rather he follow Theon’s lead and just bow out gracefully with the payout he was given.

Drogo has been sweating, trying to manage the expectations of leadership while also trying to keep the morale of his team high — while also trying to make the right decisions to keep everyone as safe as possible while doing the work — while also working against a clock, contending against limited resources and dealing with every fucking person who doesn’t know his job, who is fucking mad at him because he didn’t let them do exactly what they wanted to do.

So Grey mildly asks, “When?” again.

And Drogo quietly says, “I’m sorry. I don’t know. I’m hoping soon.”

Grey might actually be the one person who understands exactly what Drogo has to balance. Which might be why he nods silently and then exits out of the room without protest.

 

 

  
He has a lot of hours in the day to fill because he basically works a normal schedule of about forty hours a week. He jumps from task to task a little aimlessly, without any direction or control over where he goes next. He spends hours walking through the aisle of grocery stores before he goes home. He reads and listens to a lot of a books — on his phone while grocery shopping and also late at night. He starts to obsessively work out, because maybe he is preparing for something — or maybe because he can be better this time around — or maybe it’s just for nothing and he just needs something to do to occupy his time.

He thinks about Tiani for the first time in months. He thinks that maybe _she_ was right about him, when she flippantly commented that he needed hobbies.

He spends many evenings Skyping with his parents. Their anger has lessened and worn down more as time has gone on — they probably got bored of the repetitiveness of their accusations and lectures, too.

They casually slip in that Tiani apparently misses him and inquires about him sometimes. His mom tells him that he left rather abruptly and probably didn’t properly end his relationship with Tiani.

In response to this, Grey is like, “Oh —”

And then his dad cracks a smile on the screen. His dad says, “She’s kidding, son. We know Tiani is a lesbian.”

Grey says, “Oh, so she told her parents. How did it go?”

“No idea.”

“Ah, okay.”

He talks to his parents regularly enough that the conversation has become a little stale. There’s only so much local gossip that they can update him on. There’s only so many things they can say about his brother. There are only so many times he can detail out the things he eats in a day to his mother. And when his parents ask him about Dr. Tarly, he tells them that as far as he knows, Sam is fine. They are not buds, so he actually has no idea how Sam is doing in life.

He gives his parents updates on the people that they know, because this way, Grey can pretend that he has real friends and that he can give something back to his folks after his folks spent almost an hour talking about their various students whose problems seem very quaint and pointless to him.

He tells his folks that Drogo is now his boss, and that’s a little strange, but eh, it’s like anything else. They are not as close anymore because it’s just weird now.

His mom says that Drogo is a nice boy and that it’s a shame that it’s weird between them now.

He tells his folks that Daario and him keep throwing around the idea of going sailing together on Daario’s boat one of these days, but their schedules haven’t synced up quite yet. He refrains from telling his parents that Daario probably threw out the boat thing as a polite courtesy offer. It is probably not real.

Grey tells his parents that Missandei is fine. They work closer together than they ever have, and it’s fine. She’s a nice person and is pleasant to work with.

This is the point in which his mom thinks is the right time to blurt out, “Nudho, if you are gay, it’s okay. You can tell us. I would hope that you aren’t scared to tell us like Tiani was scared to tell her parents. You know we are more progressive than most parents, right?”

 

 

  
He doesn’t even realize how angry he is at her until Daenerys finally shows her face.

It is while she’s making the rounds with some visiting VIPs, some dignitaries from Dorne, as he looks up at her from the crowd below and watches her speak serenely and tell them all that the organization is exploring some inter-agency collaboration and resource-sharing.

He thinks about how she hasn’t taken a meeting with him once since he’s been back — and it’s _been_ months. He also think about she didn’t really visit him while he was healing, and he made excuses for her — like how he told himself that she is a very, very busy person.

He tries to catch her eye, but she is steadfastly unseeing.

 

 

  
Missandei’s microphone and earpiece is linked to them in the van — the link goes both ways — and it’s actually during prep for a run-through that she purposely overhears Daario giving Grey some grief about Alayaya.

The line is wide open, as Daario’s clear, teasing voice is saying, “You like _herrr,”_ in a sing-song. “You want to hold her _hannnd._ You want to fall asleep to the sound of her _breathinggg._ You want to listen to her tell you all about her _daaay_ —”

“Oh my God, _shut up.”_ Grey’s low voice is clear and a rumble in her earpiece. “You don’t know what you’re even talking about, asshole.”

Daario is chuckling without any self-consciousness. Missy can almost hear his smile, as he says, “Okay, in all seriousness, man, I think you should go for it. You like her. She likes you. You _deserve_ to be _happy._ Fuck the rules, am I right? Neither of you supervise the other. It’s all good, right? Back me up, Missy. Tell me I’m right.”

She basically behaves like a deer caught in the headlights — she freezes where she’s at, even though they cannot see her. _Thankfully,_ they can’t see her.

She accidentally kind of hiccups a little bit — and the sound of it travels over the line. Then she recovers — after a lot of effort, a burning face, and a pounding heart. She says, “Y-yeah! Totally! Daario, you are _so right_. Grey, you _do_ deserve to be happy!”

Motherfucking _shit._

That was psychotically enthusiastic.

She is holding her breath now.

And sure enough, after a pregnant pause on all of their ends, Daario finally says, _“Okay,_ what is going on here?”

And then, quick as a lightning bolt, Daario’s voice goes loud — and it cracks. He says, “Oh my God! You like him! Oh my God! You’re into him! Oh my God! You are jealous!”

And then he starts cracking up in all of their ears, mockingly, for like, thirty seconds straight.

Then he shouts out, “Oh my God! And he smacked you in the face and _everything!_ Is that what it _takes,_ Missy? Is that what it _takes?_ Does that _do it_ for you?”

 

 

  
After that, both of their lives are made miserable by Daario — and then by the rest of the team because Daario is not really great at being low-key. Her life is more disrupted because she’s more sensitive about this. Grey remains psychotically quiet whenever the conversation switches to his personal life — to all of the teasing.

In contrast, her face just freezes and her body freezes and she is just immobile and frightened by all of the teasing — and what comes from this is that Daario gets one look at her stupid face, and he guffaws. He points to her face and he is telling her that he’s _nailing_ it. He’s really got her _number._ He is totally _right,_ isn’t he?

Tyrion gets in on it. Kojja gets in on it. Yara basks in it. Even Alayaya is super amused by the entire thing.

It gets to the point where Drogo actually requests a short meeting with the both of them to _talk_ about this. He looks really uncomfortable, like he would rather not be doing this at all. He gets right to it. He straight up looks into their faces and asks if they engaging in a personal relationship.

And Missy says, “Define personal.”

Right as Grey says, “No.”

Which is really mortifying to her. So everything continues to be awesome. She only asked because sometimes they go out for drinks as a group and that is friendly and casual and like, jovial and stuff. She was only wondering if that sort of thing _counts._

Because she asked him to define it, Drogo says, “Are you two engaging in a sexual relationship together? Or, are you dating?”

This time, Grey waits before answering. Just so she can really _bask in it._

She meekly says, “No,” casting a glance over at Grey, who is standing right next to her. She’s looking at him like she is hoping he’d be pleased that she is agreeing with him and corroborating him here.

His face reveals nothing.

Drogo then says, “Okay then.” He then awkwardly reminds them that they have a no fraternization policy because two people in a personal relationship can’t work together in the field because hard decisions get made there, and when there are personal stakes involved — the decision-making can get muddied. He tells them if that they _were_ in a relationship, they have to report it to him and there might be some team rearrangement or some interdepartmental shuffling that happens.

This is when Missy decides is the right time to make a joke for the first time ever in life. She says, “Hey, does that mean that — if we’re dating — I get to be taken off of prostitute duty? Because I’ll do it if it means I get taken off prostitute duty.”

No one laughs. Because neither really _get_ that she is trying to lighten the really heavy energy here.

Drogo is just staring at her tiredly. He asks, “Are you trying to tell me you _are_ in a relationship?”

And then she gets embarrassed again. She shakes her head and says, “No! We’re not! I have no idea how this rumor became such a big deal!”

 

 

  
Soon after that humiliation, during lunch time, Grey actually walks up to her while she is eating by herself and yanks her pita wrap right out of her hands. He is holding her food as he stares her down from his standing position.

His face is serious, but not unkind, as he says, “Hey, some feedback — take it or leave it — but definitely take it. You really need to work on controlling how you exhibit anxiety. Because it’s written all over your face and all over your body. And people see it very clearly, and they are capitalizing on it. That is why we are getting so much shit right now. Yeah? That make sense?”

And then he is ripping a chunk out of her wrap with his teeth, chewing it and holding it in his cheek as he gives her back the rest of it. “I deserve that for what you’re putting me through,” he explains.

And then he suddenly smiles at her.

And then her heart starts to hammer, _what the fuuuck._

He says, “I’m kidding. It’s fine. It happens. This is how we learn, so I’m glad it’s happening in a safe space versus like, out there in the field and you get your head blown off because of it. I’m actually pretty concerned about how much shit you give away in your face. Like, Missandei — you honestly really need to work on playing it closer to the vest. Your feelings are just bleeding out all the time.”

And just aghast and dejected now, she glumly says, “Are they _really? Man!”_

 

 

  
The ladies saw that she was called into the principal’s office and also, she’s had a bit of a week, so they pull Missy out after work on Friday to chill — to bowl, actually.

Yara has her foot propped up on a small drink table, her scuffed rented bowling shoe swaying back and forth to the pop music overhead. Yara is trying to chat with Missy — as she puts half of her attention on her teammate, Brienne, who is like, wildly great at bowling.

Yara thinks she’s being like, _the most_ supportive bitch to her buddies — like Missandei needs to get laid so she will stop being such a fucking virgin, all cowering all the time like her butt is pristine when johns be asking her for anal, and Grey needs to get laid because he might be a psychopath now due to forced celibacy because of his penis shit — so they should smash a few times for the good of their mental health and for work!

Yara thinks she is making a lot of sense, as she is saying, “I feel like — all the fucking _rules,_ man. It’s like, are we fucking adults who are fucking trained professionals — or are we little fucking hormonal children? It’s like — _YEAH! Brie!_ You motherfucking _beast!_ Fucking _turkey_ that shit!”

Missy has to swing backwards so she doesn’t get swiped in the face as Yara excitedly stands up to high-five Brienne. Missandei and Alayaya are getting _slaughtered_ right now. It was completely a mistake to go whites versus darks here.

As Yara flounces back down in her seat, as Alayaya takes her turn, Yara resumes her rousing inspirational speech. She says, “Like, check it — we’re friends. We’re all friends. We _like_ each other enough that we hang out a lot when we’re not working. I think that our _feelings_ for each other makes the team work better together. Because that trust is like, _deep,_ you know? It was our feelings for Grey and Theon that kept them alive. Like, my brother _could be dead_ right now if we didn't push so hard for leadership to sanction the retrieval. Like, it's nuanced, _you know?”_

Missandei doesn’t really understand why it feels like she is getting lectured at right now — save for the fact that Yara has been steadily working on a pitcher of beer by herself. Missy just nods gravely and says, “Sure.”

And then Yaya gets back to her seat, holding out her hand for a high-five, which Missandei automatically doles out — Alayaya picked up a spare, and they are still getting killed.

Yara yanks her feet off the table. Because it’s her turn. She stands up and cracks her neck.

Yara’s parting shot is, “And like — Yaya fucked the guy, _multiple times,_ back when they were youngins. You don’t see her making poor decisions in the field just because they smashed, do you? Like, fucking leadership is so fucking — it’s bullshit, babe — thinking they can tell us how to _live,_ man.”

Yaya is snickering as she leans back in her own seat. She is holding up her beer glass, like she is clinking Yara’s imaginary glass.

And as Yara is bowling, as Brienne sits down and digs her fingers into the cheese fries, Alayaya asks Missandei, “Are you really into him? He’s pretty fun in bed. Or at least — he _was._ I can’t tell you what’s going on now.” Alayaya is pointing at her head — at her brain.

Then she says, “Poor guy. I think he has major dick issues.”

Brienne sarcastically mutters out, “Oh my God, you _think?”_ And then she goes pink. And then she starts needlessly explaining. She says, “I don’t mean  _small dick_ issues. So I don’t know what his penis looked like before — but I don’t mean his ego is immense. I mean that, when this happened to my face —” Brienne is gesturing to her face, to the scar. “It completely changed how I felt about myself — and it was _already rough_ before. Like, no one puts _me_ on prostitute duty. Which is fine. Prostitute duty _sucks_ —”

“Oh my gosh, Brienne!” Alayaya says, laughing in excitement. “Are you _drunk?”_

 

 

 

 


	11. Grey is scared of intimacy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey finally relents and goes out with the future love of his life. It turns out that she is amazing, and he was afraid of that. Missy tries to make a case for date number two, but the future love of her life is like, whoa, slow down, I didn't even consent to date number one! Sigh.

 

 

  
The teasing about Grey eventually dies down because people find other things to focus on.

Like, there is enough of a delay between when she signals them and when Robb and Brienne go in to pull her out that she is legitimately scared she is going to have to start blowing a guy to maintain her cover.

She handles the entire thing by the book — all the while, just terrified that she is alone in a room with a low-level but dangerous criminal and he is going to hurt her real badly when he figures out who she is. One hand is on his belt, undoing it, and the other is closing in on her gun when Robb and Brienne finally enter the room.

Afterward, she is _pissed._

Daario tries to explain to her what happened by telling her that the comms glitched and they lost the signal for just a split second. She buys that, but she doesn’t _like it._ She snaps at him and tells him that it was for far longer than a second. He amends what he said and tells her maybe it was a few seconds. She stops herself from being overtly wounded about his lackadaisical attitude.

She also stops herself from saying that she is so upset because she was scared she was all fucking alone in there because they fucking _abandoned_ her or something _terrible_ was happening to all of them. She stops herself from conveying that she is still insecure and scared and under-experienced.

Instead, she tries to hold onto anger. She gets bitchy with Drogo in his office and tells him she is fucking _sick_ of this fucking work.

He ominously tells her, “This is what you wanted, Missandei. This is what you’ve been clamoring for. No one said it was glamorous work.”

She says, “I know it’s not supposed to be glamorous! I just thought I’d be able to use _my brain_ some of the time. But now I know all that fucking _matters_ is that I have tits and an ass and my skin is dark and I know how to use a gun.”

 

 

  
Her meltdown becomes the new focal point. Sandor and Bronn think that she is being young, petulant, and precious. From their point of view, no one fucking feels fulfilled by the work they do — but they believe in the mission, so that is why they do the work they do.

Yara, Alayaya, Kojja, and Brienne understand how she must be feeling, but individually, they all convey to her that the way she handled it was not great. A hissy fit was not the right way to handle that. She has to be ever-careful to avoid being branded as a difficult bitch to work with. That kind of reputation will follow her in her career.

Drogo started his career at the organization on the streets, constantly posing as a thug or a drug-seeker. He hated that, too. But those are the optics, and they can’t fucking send fucking Robb Stark out to be a prostitute or a tweaker in South King’s Landing — they just fucking can’t — so he doesn’t know why this woman doesn’t _get_ this. They _all_ have to pay their fucking dues.

Grey actually goes up to her — as she’s headed out for the night. She hasn’t wiped her face so her mascara has smeared underneath her eyes. He says to her, “Hey, man, I’m really sorry we lost the connection with you. I know it must’ve been really scary to feel like you were alone in there or that you were abandoned by us.”

 

 

So he relents and reluctantly invites her out for a drink — just in case she wants to talk about stuff some more. He basically treats it like a dental appointment. He even tells her that she doesn’t have to take him up on it — it’s just a fucking idea.

He’s nervous that, based on how things have been going, that things will get out of hand between the two of them, and then his ability to do his job will be a little fucked. He’s nervous about getting to know her better because what if he learns that she is _awesome?_ It is not like he can do anything about that besides feel terrible about it. He can’t date her for so _many_ reasons, the most prominent being the fucking _mess_ in his pants. The other big reason is that they aren’t allowed to. The third and fourth and fifth reasons are that he is terrible with personal stuff, he doesn’t have the time, and he ruins everything nice that he touches because when people learn who he really is, they are no longer compelled by him and they no longer want to be with him because they are horrified by him. He understands that she currently likes him because of how he presents — but that is superficial stuff and not really who he is.

She looks so tired and so happy when his offer registers in her brain. She looks up at him and meekly says, “You wanna get a drink? With _me?”_

He feels a lot of dread and a lot of sadness inside over this. He’s already projecting forward to a moment in time when that look on her face just dies.

He shakes it off. He puts a smile on his face. He makes his voice teasingly say, “Okay, you’re making me regret putting it out there already.”

“No!” she says quickly, her eyes widening, just being cute as fucking all shit. “Let me grab my stuff! I’ll be really fast! And then I’ll meet you — well, how do you wanna do this? Do you want to drive separately and meet there, or do you want to leave a car here and drive together?” And after a short pause, one in which her face lightly constricts because she’s feeling embarrassed now, she self-consciously adds, “Where are we going, by the way?”

 

 

  
She scrubs her face really fast with the soap that comes out of the soap dispenser. It’s a harsh soap and as she’s doing it at the bathroom sink, she is like, _oh God, this is a bad idea._ But she still finishes scrubbing and washing the soap off with hot water. Her skin, once it’s dry, feels taut and really raw.

She ties her hair back, and then loads all of her bags on her shoulders, as she tells her throbbing heart to just fucking _relax._ He is just a person. Just like she is a person.

She tries not to hit on him or flirt with him because it’s really verging on sexual harassment at this point — but she sees him waiting for her at his car, watching her, and she is like, “I think I had a dream about this once.”

Her voice echoes in the cavernous garage.

And then she is like, _what the fuck oh my God!_

He smoothly just ignores all the stuff that she happens to feel mortified over. He waits for her to put her bags into her trunk before he gets into his car. She is left panicked and unsure for a second — she doesn’t know if she’s meant to follow him in her car or if she’s meant to get into _his_ car. Like, they haven’t hammered out the details of this at all. Like —

“Come on, Missandei. Jesus Christ.” His voice is floating out of his open window. “Get in my car.”

She scurries over. And once she’s inside and buckled up, she refrains from saying something super dorky about how his car is really clean and smells nice and how she likes the upholstery. She refrains from making a joke about prostitution and how it kind of feels like he’s picking her up — for a _sex act._ She just refrains from talking completely, because she doesn’t want to _ruin_ this.

He reaches out to his console and turns on some music.

 

 

  
There is a shit ton of tension and a shit ton of awkwardness, even in the crowded bar. It’s pretty tiring for him. So after he puts the glass of beer that she requested in front of her at a small standing table, he straight up asks her, “Why do you like me, anyway?”

“You think I _like_ you?” she asks incredulously.

He gives her a look. Like, a look that says — oh are we doing _this now?_

She shrinks sheepishly. She is just being a little grade school about it — just responding in horror and denial when her crush figures out that she is crushing on him.

Then her face gets hot, as she says, “Are you fishing for compliments?”

He is still staring patiently, waiting for her to answer for real.

“It’s that obvious, huh?” she asks.

“You bought me a plant,” he says mildly, taking a sip from his beer.

“That was the thing that clued you in?” Her face is still burning up.

“No, actually,” he says. “It was when you asked me out on a date. It kind of surprised me. I mean, good for you — that was assertive. But yeah, it was surprising. We don’t know each other well. Our interactions have been limited. And there was also that part where I hit you in the face. It seemed strange that things changed after that.”

 

 

  
She confesses to him that she actually thinks he is _so cool._ She whispers it over the top of her beer glass, kind of bending over the table and swaying a little bit.

He finds all of her mannerisms to be really charming, so that sucks for him. And his pulse generally throbs in his face and head and he feels really undeserving and misunderstood, as he listens to her shyly tell him that she likes how good he is at his job. She has always admired how dedicated and how deeply responsible he is to his people and to his work.

She tells him that she thinks he’s really funny — and it’s a really weird kind of funny. It’s not flashy and preening. It is like, kind of mean. And low key. And attractive.

She is stopping herself from saying that she actually thinks it’s sexy.

She is leaning hard on her elbows, squeezing her shoulders together as she plays with her empty beer glass, which he’s been eyeing. He feels like he should go and grab her another one, but he doesn’t feel like taking a break from her just yet.

She says, “You just seem like a really strong person. And you seem like you don’t fuck around — except with Alayaya, what the hell? I thought you were a big rule-follower.”

He is completely blindsided by the statement that he actually just freezes in stunned silence.

This is when she laughs — right at his face — and he is wondering if she is drunk already, but she _can’t possibly be._ This is when she snorts loudly in her laughing, and then is surprised by her own snorting — so she laughs harder — and he also finds himself feeling like it’s all just utterly perfect and lovely and he hates himself for it — he knew it was a mistake to go out alone with her.

He starts to stutter. He says, “How did — who told — what — okay, what — but — but it’s not what you think it is.”

“And what do I think it is?” she says to him, still smiling widely, still laughing, still teasing. “And why are you so concerned about what I must be thinking about it?” And then her face just glows — softly — before she self-righteously realizes it, before she confidently says, “You like me, too. You _care_ about what I think of you.”

He neither confirms nor denies this. He just says nothing.

 

 

  
They end up taking a walk, even though it’s lightly drizzling outside. They aimlessly navigate through a lot of well-manicured, brightly lit blocks of shops, restaurants, and bars. He tells Missandei that he and Alayaya hooked up a few times during training — so this was seriously a decade ago. And it was a dumb move, but he was young. Also, it wasn’t a relationship. It was like — a really casual thing. He’s not even sure Alayaya is capable of feeling that way about him. She’s really fun and easy going and outgoing. He is . . . not.

He grimaces — before he reluctantly admits that there have been slip ups between the two of them now and then, over the years. But he’s probably fully kicked that crutch at this point — because of what happened to him.

So then they talk about that a little bit. He feels like he’s on the verge of jumping out of his skin the entire time — or he’s on the verge of vomiting his guts out.

When she gently asks him about it, he keeps it short. He tells her that it’s probably about what people would imagine it’s like. It was scary. It was upsetting. He wanted to die at a certain point and didn’t understand why he was made to keep on living. It’s been hard sometimes, to move on from it. But he generally tries really hard to move on from it.

Grey is shocked to see that she is crying — when he looks at her.

He ends up automatically trying to tell her to knock that shit off. He says, “Don’t. It’s not something — just don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t need it, and it bothers me.”

She quickly wipes her eyes with her hands. She says, “Sorry.”

 

 

  
Fucking _hours_ have passed, and now they are just ridiculously trying to come up with new conversation topics and excuses to elongate the night. She tells him about her family and how her mom died from colon cancer three years ago — that’s why her dad lives with her. He was devastated because he loved her mom — but also, she thought that he wouldn’t know how to take care of himself because he’s had a woman taking care of him his entire life.

She tells Grey that actually, she was wrong. And now, her dad is taking care of her. That’s all her dad does, actually. He just makes her home life easy and he just worries about her all the time.

“Does he know?”

“About what I do?” Missy supplies. “Sort of. He was actually a high-up government official back in Naath. He was law enforcement, too.”

“Oh, wow. What does he think of what you do?”

“Oh, he totally hates it,” she says smoothly. “My brothers do, too. They think that I have a death wish because our mom died. They wanted me to stay an analyst.”

 

 

  
He’s the one that calls it. He’s the one who checks the time on his phone and tells her that it’s actually really late, and they should really go home and get some rest.

She’s the one that reaches across the car console after he puts his car in park, back in the garage at work. She grabs onto his hand, getting his attention, getting him to look at her. She straight up says, “I had a really nice time with you tonight. I’d love to see you again.”

He says, “This wasn’t a date, Missandei,” as he feels her hand tighten around his. He mutters, “Also we _can’t.”_

“Can’t what? Can’t date or we can’t see each other again?”

“Both,” he says. He pries his hand out of hers. This is exactly the kind of shit that he was afraid of. She is fucking amazing. He is a fucking mess. It’s unfair. They don’t have time for this. This is the wrong time and place. It’s not going to work out anyway.

“I mean, I’ll be seeing you tomorrow,” she offers.

He does not even have the words to verbalize how he is feeling — and he also doesn’t completely know how he is feeling. His general sense is that he needs to run far the fuck away because his entire existence is under threat. Everything in his life could be ruined if he makes the wrong decision right now. He tells himself that there are thousands of women out there that he could mess pathetically around with — and it wouldn’t make his career fucking implode.

As he is going _insane_ trying to process, she calmly says, “I’m not saying I envision us meeting each other’s friends and integrating into each other’s family and hosting Pictionary night together on weekends. I’m actually not at all sure what I mean when I say I want to keep seeing you. You just seem like a nice and interesting person. I really enjoy talking with you. Can’t we keep on doing _that?_ Why is that not allowed?”

 

 

  
So he says no. He feels really shitty about it — on many counts. She’s so fucking hot. He’s so fucking pathetic. She deserves better. This is not going to end well at all. Their jobs are also kind of at stake. They cannot be caught messing around with each other, especially after the hitting thing. He can’t give her what she needs. She’s going to eventually be so let down by him. He is just gonna die alone forever, and they need to accept this about him.

He says, “I’m sorry. But it’s just not a good idea. We work together. If it goes badly, we _still_ have to work together.”

And then after a lengthy pause, she says, “Wow. This is the third, maybe fourth, maybe fifth time I’ve been rejected by you. I’m starting to lose count.”

It’s a joke. But it still manages to make him feel terrible.

 

 

  
She says goodbye to him with a handshake, because she doesn’t even think he can handle a hug right now. She is internally shaking her head — ruefully — kind of finding humor in all of this. She is definitely hearing his no, loud and clear. She knows he is serious. She can sense that he is very scared. She cannot tell how much of it is from the trauma he suffered and how much of it is just innately him. She feels bad that he is so scared of getting closer to her.

She still thinks that he is _really_ cute. Now, she knows that he likes her back. She tells herself that — for now — maybe that is enough.

 

 

  
Her dad is a little concerned because she comes home far later than he expected. He asks her if she’s too tired for a nightcap — and at first, she thinks her dad is offering her booze and she is like _whoa,_ at one in the morning?

But then she sees the tea kettle on the stove.

They have a chat, and she tries to tell him as much as she safely can. She tells him she had a bit of a rough time at work, for normal reasons that work is aggravating. She tells him that it feels like she always has to work so hard to earn her place — and she feels like it’s especially hard because she’s a woman, and also a woman of color. And then she gets upset about it sometimes because she is weak. And then everyone is telling her to shut up and stop up her feelings. Everyone is always telling her to wait her turn in line — but she thinks that she _has_ been doing that — and sometimes waiting for her turn feels so abnormal, so she feels angry over it sometimes. Just sometimes. But that’s normal — it’s just normal stuff, isn’t it?

Her dad sighs. And he tells her that he’s stopping himself — with a lot of effort — from telling her to fucking leave that job because _why_ is she just giving up her _life_ to this. He tells her he’s stopping himself from telling her to take the lessons that he has earned and to save herself time and heartache.

She says, “Ah, but that’s the thing about how the brain and how the heart works. Sometimes we have to learn for ourselves, how it feels to be broken.” And then she smiles comically — goofily.

 

 

  
She generally tries to prove to the both of them that she can compartmentalize, by being purely professional with him at work. So she generally ignores him and doesn’t act like she thinks he is special at all.

He seems very relieved by it. He seems like he’s releasing the breath that he’s been holding in all night.

When Daario casually tells her that she wants to make the smoochies with Grey sooo bad — as she’s standing around bothering no one, drinking her coffee — she is sick of it.

She snaps and says, “Yeah! So what of it! So why don’t you fucking figure out your shit so that I’m not stuck debating over whether I have to kill a guy or blow a guy because _you_ fucked up?”

Daario looks totally stunned.

And then he says, “Okay, fair.”

 

 

  
When they get pulled into Drogo’s office, Grey is really sure it’s so he can get punched in the face for the other night, for entertaining the idea of breaking the rules by getting naked with a colleague. Missandei is thinking the same thing, and her fist is clenched and she’s ready to punch Drogo out, because she’s really sick of his fucking intrusive shit. Just let her _live her life,_ holy shit.

Drogo sees her fist and says, “Relax. You’re not in trouble.”

And then he says, “So I think I have a way for Grey to get off of surveillance, and I sort of have a way for prostitute duty to be more . . . mentally stimulating for you, Missy. So you both can stop looking at me like you both fucking hate me, okay?”

It’s probably the first time in months that they actually remember that Drogo might actually be a person. With real feelings.

 

 

 

 


	12. Grey goes back into the field

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy tells her bestie about her crush. Does not go as expected. Grey hangs out with Ironborn and reminds himself that they are just AWFUL people. Missy teaches her future babe how to speak her language, so that he can easily communicate with his future father-in-law figure later probably. Then! They both settle into their new-old-slightly-different roles.

  
  


For the first time in long weeks, maybe one and a half months, Missy gets together with Dany on a Saturday for a meal of salads and green juice. Dany is on some sort of restricted diet, and Missy sucks up her thick juice using a straw, sure her poop is going to be an ordeal later because of this.

They catch up a little bit — Missy picks up right away that Dany is a fair bit tense because of other factors. Missy asks Dany how work is, and Dany mutters that it’s the same — which means that it is still very stressful. Dany has higher security clearance, so there are things that Dany has to keep to herself and only herself. She vaguely tells Missandei that the Lannisters are real pieces of shit sometimes.

Missy asks how Dany’s brother is doing, and Dany says he’s also the same — which means that he is still reckless and causing expensive problems for Dany to clean up after.

When it’s Missy’s turn to share, she gives Dany all of the boring updates — her dad is fine, her brothers are fine, work is going a lot better — and in response to all of the mundanity, Dany says, “Tell me something fun and frivolous you are doing. Let me live vicariously through you.”

For one brief moment, it’s like they are back in college again — and Dany has half of her head shaved and is reciting a lot of pretentious philosophy and writing a lot of bad poetry. For a moment, it’s like Missy’s old friend is back, and not this severe person who is so tense all the time because she holds entirely way too much responsibility on her shoulders now.  

Missy says, “Um, okay, well — um — there is a guy —”

Dany perks up, right away. She exclaims, “There is a guy! Who is the guy! How did you meet him! Tell me all about him!”  

“Oh, it’s not like that,” Missy gently corrects, feeling a little sheepish now. And then she blurts, “It’s Grey.”

Dany kind of freezes. Then her brows knit together, creasing as she thinks. And then after a pause, she slowly says, “Oh.” And then she says, _“Okay.”_

“We’ve just been _talking,”_ Missandei says quickly, now just bent on dropping this entire thing — it was a stupid mistake to bring it up. “Nothing big has happened. I just like him. He’s . . . very lovely.”

“Oh, he is,” Dany says, still trying to absorb this. “Um, you know he’s gone through a lot —”

“Yes,” Missandei says, nodding gravely.

“What he went through must’ve been so traumatizing.”

“Of course,” Missy says, now wondering where Dany is going with this.

She doesn’t have to wait very long, because Dany comes out and says it. She says, “I’m really surprised to hear this. I’m glad you like him. I just didn’t expect he’d be, um, capable of this already — given what happened to him.”

Dany is saying this out of unprocessed, repressed guilt. She feels that she is very responsible for what happened. The last conversation she had with him was not good. He was very unhappy and angry with her. They have not talked since. She keeps telling herself she’s been busy. She realizes she has been avoiding him because she is a coward. She thought that she could continue keeping her life demarcated, with her personal side on one end and her professional side on the other. This is why she is especially underwhelmed by Missandei’s update.

On the other side of the table, Missandei now feels embarrassed and vulnerable again. She worries her feelings are always going to be written on her face, and it will be a convenient thing for people to continue judging her with. She now feels stupid for sharing this with Dany, in the face of Dany’s caution. She should have kept it a secret. It’s not even a big deal or important.

She tries to end this part of the conversation by saying, “Um, maybe I’m reading him wrong.”

“I didn’t mean to bring the conversation down,” Dany says. “I’m just surprised, is all.”

“It’s okay,” Missy says. “I get it.”

  
  
  


He doesn’t want to spend time with her outside of work — not something he said directly to her, but something she has intuited. To give him a break from her good intentions — because they seem to freak him out — she just gives him a wide berth. She doesn’t ask him out for another round of drinks or for dinner. She either leaves the gym quickly with a small smile when she sees him entering, or she just continues running in silence, without making a big deal out of his presence.

Their schedules are too busy during the day. This is why they stay late on campus, ordering takeout, sometimes with Tal and Balaq taking part in the lessons and prep, too. Tal and Balaq don’t pick up things as quickly as Grey does, though.

And he picks things up scarily fast, almost inhumanly fast. He has a really great ear for languages, and he has a stunning memory with really good recall. Tal and Balaq actually learn really well and quickly, but they struggle in predictable ways. They are at a little bit of a disadvantage, too, because the are not as proficient in Low Valyrian as Grey is to start.

She’s basically teaching them her language, the Naathi patois. They will never pass as native speakers, especially since the time frame is so short, but she thinks that she can get them to sound like they are the children of immigrants.

They’re in a conference room late after work. Tal and Balaq have already gone home. She’s watching him dig out some dumplings that got stuck together at the bottom of a takeout container. She has also learned that he can _eat_ , that he would be a pricey date because he can really put some food away. She imagines that he eats a lot because he works out a lot.

She says to him, “School must’ve been easy for you, right?”

Grey shrugs, as he shoves a dumpling into his mouth. His cheek is puffed out as he says, “Maybe academically. But the school system in the Summer Isles isn’t the greatest. So I’d probably be average if I went to school here, or if I went to a private school.”

She doesn’t understand why he always downplays his intelligence — whether it’s designed to be manipulative or if he just has an odd self-consciousness about it. “I doubt it,” she says. “Your memory is scary.”

He laugh-snorts. “Scary?”

“You’re _so fast_ at picking up things _.”_

“Nah,” he drawls, now digging for another dumpling. “You’re just a good teacher.”

Then he smiles at her.

  
  
  


Grey doesn’t know what Theon’s game is, when Theon invites Grey over for a dinner party.

Yara is already at Theon’s house when Grey arrives, this time with a bottle of wine. She spots it, and yanks it right out of his hands, snorting and going into the kitchen for a corkscrew. Grey realizes that she is already drunk.

Their Ironborn friends are also there. Grey has met them a handful of times over the years. They are all — in a word — _assholes._ They are also drunk. And loud. So fucking loud already.

Ralf cuts in when Theon is trying to introduce a woman named Ruby to Grey. Ralf inappropriately announces, “And she doesn’t mind getting fucked with a strap-on it seems!” 

And Grey is mildly like, “Oh, cool,” just continually unimpressed with Yara and Theon’s asshole friends every time he sees them.

And then he tries to soften — because he feels bad for this woman. He holds out his hand to her. He says, “Hi, I’m Grey. It’s very nice to meet you.”

Her face is as pink as her hair. She is dressed haphazardly, in a large, patchy sweater that engulfs her small frame. The artificial dye in her hair was applied at home, and unevenly. He immediately assesses her as insecure about her looks, easily stressed, and probably a self-proclaimed feminist. She is not at all the type that Theon used to date before the accident.

She shakes his hand, and she tries to valiantly ignore Ralf’s and Dagmer’s snickering. She says, “Theon’s told me a lot about you.”

“Ah, all good things, I’m sure,” he says.

And then Grey has to put his hands out and slam them into the kitchen counter, because fucking Dagmer has body-checked himself into Grey’s back. Grey glares into the shiny granite, his eyes actually searching for Theon’s gun so that he knows that it’s around for him to shoot this fucker in the face later — but Theon has left no trace of his weapon anywhere.

Dagmer is laughing at Grey, and also groping him hard with his hands — on his back, shoulders, arms, butt, stomach — and when his rough hands start going lower, Grey shoves him away — hard.

“This asshole can’t take a joke!” Dagmer announces to the room, after he recovers. “I was just gon’ say — damn, Grey. You’ve been working out. I expected you to be frail and waiflike, like Theon. But I see that losing a dick hasn’t fucked you up like it did Theon. Good for you!”

  
  
  


Dinner is just fucking terrible. Theon made beautiful food again. His sister and their friends alternate between shitting on the pretension and mocking Theon for being effeminate now — as they scarf down the food without tasting it. Grey pretty much spends dinner holding the stem of his wine glass tightly, just in case he needs to break the glass and then drive a shard into the neck of an asshole Ironborn. Grey also spends dinner just in disbelief that Theon is stupid enough to think that this dinner could’ve been anything but this crazy shitshow.

But Theon is admirably unfazed. He doesn’t let go of Ruby’s hand ever. Sometimes, eating is actually awkward for them because they refuse to let each other go. They keep staring at each other — even as they eat. Grey observes this, and he thinks it’s wildly inefficient, and it’s also really gross. He is wondering why he is subjected to this shit when he could be sitting at home in the dark, doing nothing. Like, doing nothing in the dark would be better than this.

Grey tries to help clean up after dinner, but Ruby shoos him out of the kitchen.

So he ends up on the back deck of Theon’s house, as Yara and the Ironborn assholes all take a smoke break.

They offer him a cigarette. He nopes that. And Ralf snorts, because he thinks Grey is such a fucking uptight priss who is incapable of fun and Ralf doesn’t understand why Yara is even friends with this asshole.  

“He seems like he’s doing a lot better,” Dagmer says, crossing his arms over his chest, clearing his throat loudly around the cigarette. “That’s good.”

“Yeah,” Yara says. “It’s shocking, actually. I thought for sure he was going to kill himself within the year. But look at him now — he’s driving himself to the grocery store. He’s going to movies with Ruby. It is fucking crazy.”

  
  
  


He silently watches her crack her neck and stretch out her arms, wearing leopard print tights and a black tank top. He adjusts the cap on his head, pulls it lower, when she accidentally makes eye contact with him — catches him watching her. She smiles at him right away, but he cuts eye contact — a little uncomfortable and maybe a little ashamed.

It’s not even time for breakfast yet, but when they post her ad on the website, the hits come in right away — she is busy and gets calls right away because she has an innocent face, he thinks.

Robb and Daario are debating avidly about which country produces the greatest runners as Sandor and Bronn watch cable television — an infomercial for a blender — sitting on the edge of the bed. Grey is standing around just waiting, as Drogo hovers close by, chewing nicotine gum, alert and serious and stiff — which is different from how Grey remembers it _feeling_ , working with Drogo like this.

They listen as she talks on the phone. She says, “Yes, that’s really me in the photo.” She also says, “Yes, I’d love to get together. Yes, it’ll be fun, I promise.”

She goes and waits in the motel room across the hall.

They are dead silent as they hang around and as Bronn watches the door to her room through the peephole. Bronn signals when he sees the john arrive and enter her room. Grey’s heart starts to beat a little bit harder after that — from adrenaline and also a little bit of stress.

Daario is listening to what is going on the wire. The electronic signal comes just seconds after that. He confirms the solicitation to them by saying, “Okay, it’s a go.”

They rush into the room. The john immediately freezes, paralyzed with fear. Drogo quickly cuffs him.

And this time, the john is very young — early 20s maybe. He actually starts crying with his face tilted into the carpet like his entire life is over.

  
  
  


After they confirm that the kid — he is a nineteen-year-old college student — is not armed, they uncuff him. They are in another room, separated from Missandei. Grey is now allowed to talk to people, but the language lessons she’s been giving him haven’t yet come in handy. This kid’s Common Tongue is very proficient — it’s his first language actually. And so they all understand him as he sobs and tells Grey that his parents are going to kill him. He only a sophomore. He’s studying engineering. He has a girlfriend. She wants to wait until marriage because she comes from a very traditional family. He wants to respect that. He is just _weak._ He wails to Grey and tells Grey, “My life is over!”

Grey says, “You know what you are doing is wrong and illegal, right?”

“I will never do it again!”

Grey wants to believe this kid, but Grey is also a realist.

Drogo decides to give the kid a break and just give him a ticket. Drogo decides not to have the kid’s car towed.  

  
  
  


The next guy they arrest is an adult man in his fifties with one gold front tooth. He is really angry and in shock that he is being arrested for this. He shouts various insults at them — Grey only understands a few of the terms, but he generally gets the gist. The guy is calling them useless, corrupt pigs. The guy is shouting that he has done nothing wrong. He also wants to know why they aren’t out there catching murderers and pedophiles and rapists. He wants to know why they are wasting taxpayer money on this fucking bullshit.

This guy has no criminal record. He gets hit with a ticket, his car gets towed, and he vows to them that after he pays the bond fee — he’s just going to go back out and buy sex again.

In the Naathi dialect, Grey basically asks the guy, in exasperation, if he is being fucking serious right now.

  
  


Because of its convenient position between Essos and Sothoryos — and because of the extreme pacifism of its inhabitants — Naath was a trading post long before the slave trade took hold, long before a military base was built by the Valyrians. The island didn’t practice the modern concept of marriage for most of its history. Sex work wasn’t particularly stigmatized for hundreds of years, not until the arrival of Valyrians.

After the Doom, the Valyrians abandoned their post in Naath. The Naathi government broke down and splintered among different political factions. People fled or they starved.

And these are some of the reasons why there is such a high percentage of sex workers in King’s Landing of Naathi descent. This is why Drogo excitedly placed Missandei in this operation. This is also why it’s important that Grey has enough physical features to pass.

After more than a dozen arrests the day before, their roles get reversed. Kind of. It’s his first time really _out there_ , and she is kind of nervous and kind of excited for him. She tries to impart all of this knowledge she has accumulated, not yet realizing that he prefers to be quiet and introspective before he starts work. She tells him things he already knows — like that Naathi prostitutes are very savvy, yet comparatively uneducated, and their numbers are large enough that they can discriminate against outsiders and still make enough money.

Missandei reminds him to be careful with his vocabulary, to not use big words. She reminds him of the various slang words and phrases that she taught him. She reminds him that they can’t make an arrest unless the terms of the transaction is explicit and there’s a cost named. She is not even embarrassed at how silly and patronizing she sounds — because she is not aware of it.

On Grey’s part, he is patient with her anxiety. He tries to tune her out as he does his own prep in his head.

It’s actually Drogo who says, “Fucking shit, Missy. Can you get off his balls and let the poor guy have some peace and quiet for a second, yeah?”

  
  
  


Unlike her, he has no costume. He pretty much wears his clothes — a t-shirt, jeans, a jacket. His gun is in his holster, under the jacket. The car he is driving is wired. This time, she is the one listening in — and she is also in his ear with Daario and Drogo — just in case he needs a translation really fast.

It kind of all comes back effortlessly. It’s like putting on a well-worn glove. He immediately relaxes into it. He is actually good at this kind of work because he understands the nature of people really well.

He rolls down his window as his car slows next to the curb. He leans over, and he looks into the open air.

He says hello.

On the other end, after listening to him talk a little bit — in almost a flawless accent — Missandei pulls her face and her concentration away from the wire. She makes eye contact with Drogo and she shakes her head. Drogo raises his eyebrows at her, as if to say, _I know_.

  
  
  


It is during the third arrest that things go a little awry. When the woman realizes that he is law enforcement, and he’s about to arrest her — she _loses it_.

She actually starts beating her fists against him as he’s reciting her rights to her — and he doesn’t want to — but he has to cuff her. He’s trying to explain to her that she is going to be offered social services and also counseling and get resources for job training — if she wants it. But she is too busy screaming at him to really listen to him.

She calls him a fucking rapist — and he has to really bend her over the car and press her into it to stop her thrashing body from whipping into him.

And then she is sobbing as she continues screaming incoherently at him.

It’s Daario who gets really fed up with this craziness. In the Common Tongue, he snaps at her and says, “We’re trying to help you! Would you calm down!”

And her Common Tongue is actually very good. She snaps back with, “Arresting me isn’t helping, fucker!”

  
  
  


He is still damp from his quick shower in the locker room — and yawning — when he takes the elevator up to the garage. And he doesn’t even have it within himself to look surprised when he sees her waiting for him. His shoulders just slump as he trudges to his car with his bag hooked over his shoulder. He says to her, “What’s up, stalker?”

She smiles at him. She’s also exhausted. She wants to give him compliments really — she wants to tell him that he’s _so fucking good_ at what he does and it is insane and she can stand to learn _so much_ from him. She also wants to talk about how crazy their day was and how there was just so much crying and so much emotional stuff.

She also wants to tell him that she really hopes he doesn’t feel bad about being accused of being a rapist. That woman, Yiantha, has just had a rough time lately with her boyfriend and also there was a terrible incident with a shitty cop that she is kind of traumatized by and feels violated over.  

Missandei had spent half an hour having a conversation with the woman, after she calmed down a little bit. That’s why Missandei knows so much context.

She just wants to push it — and him — and spend some time dissecting everything that happened this week with him, because it’s relatively new and novel and very interesting to her.

As if reading her mind, Grey quietly says, “Miss — I’m about to crash. I need a bed, man.”

“Oh, I know,” she says softly. “I just wanted to say goodnight. And to tell you that I think you did such a good job tonight. Like, wow.”

After a heavy pause — one in which he is staring at both of their feet — he says, “Thank you.”

  
  
  



	13. Missy and Grey have a second 'date'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Turns out that Missy was right about a lot of stuff about herself and her capabilities. No man apologizes to her at all for minimizing her voice for months/years. The future love of her life is finding that the fine work of trying to heroically save women is not as fulfilling as he was expecting it to be. And then there are sex dreams! And then that babe Missandei is not even trying to hide the thirst anymore.

  
  
  
  
  


They have noticed that Missandei is right about what she’s been saying about herself for over a year now — she is great at talking to people and at getting information from people through questions. He thinks that with more training, she could be a very useful profiler.

Contrary to some conventional wisdom, the best way to get information out of someone isn’t through intimidation or threat of violence. It’s actually through building a rapport with a subject and knowing how to ask questions in the right way.  

Through talking with Yiantha after arresting her, Missandei learned that Yiantha was brought over by a male cousin, who gave her the option of working in a nail salon or working in a massage parlor. The massage parlor pays significantly more. Yiantha naturally chose her best option, and was fine with it because she went into it with both eyes opened — this is what she righteously told Missandei, with her chin squared. But then she learned how much the owner was skimming off her wages just for her to ‘rent’ a room — so fucking awful and unfair — so Yiantha struck out on her own.

Their team is able to narrow down a geographic area — a few neighborhoods — based on the information Yiantha gave. They were able to cultivate a list of massage parlors in business in the area.

Grey, Tal, and Balaq — because they are less conspicuous — spend long days visiting all locations, collecting information. They all get upsold, but the policy is to only get shoulder massages, to keep the organization clean.

Nevertheless, Balaq bewilderingly reports back after the third day out and tells them that a masseuse grabbed his dick during a massage and played it off as an accident — but it was definitely was on purpose. Balaq laughs it off, but his eyes are wide and searching. He’s nervous about getting in trouble for this. They’ve all been under a lot of scrutiny for the past couple of years — because of what happened to Grey and Theon.

The incident gets faithfully logged. Daario and Tyrion joke that Balaq is a victim of sexual assault — they think it’s hilarious because Balaq is intimidatingly big, older, and the person who accosted him was probably a young little waif who can’t even lift forty pounds.

Balaq keeps grinning over this, but he’s patiently and strategically keeping his mouth shut. He isn’t going to make any jokes about this.

It’s Alayaya — fed up with their annoying shit — with her arms crossed over her chest, and her face serious and very humorless, who says to Balaq, “No, really. You _were_ assaulted. You need to make an appointment with psych.”

He starts to groan over that — because he does not even want to waste his time with psych. But then he catches her face and then is like, “Yes, ma’am.” Alayaya is his boss — she’s been very by-the-book and process-oriented since her promotion — so of course he’s going to go and make an appointment with psych.

  
  
  
  
  
  


It does not even take that much to convince Yiantha to introduce Missandei to one of the parlor owners, a diminutive Naathi woman who doesn’t give a name but refers to herself as Auntie. Yiantha is pissed and bitter over how she has been cheated out of her wages and how she was made to just put up with it because she is new in this country. She is defiant, when their team cautioned her that she could be allowing more risk into her life because of this. She tells them there is nothing else anyone can do to her.

Grey refrains from pointing out that she can be killed. He just keeps that to himself.

Neither he or Missandei are wearing wires this time around. Their team is actually very, very lean because no arrests will be made. It’s actually just the two of them working together alone tonight.

Grey pays for her — for the whole night. Here, he has to hand over the stack to Auntie, who will fairly distribute Missandei’s wages to her at the end of the night.

Missy is surprised at how . . . little he acts. It seriously looks like he shows up as a version of himself and just acts like himself — quiet and nondescript — and everyone around him just accepts this as normal. No one questions him. No one asks him what his name is. No one wonders why he’s here or observes that he’s new. No one thinks about why he doesn’t spend too much time looking at other women. No one even wonders why he is such a baller, jumping straight to all-night sex without even taking her on a test run. Like, this wouldn’t be how she would buy a prostitute _at all,_ if she were in his shoes.

Missy feels that, in contrast, she has to painstakingly hide everything about herself, when she is working.

After they shut and lock the door behind them, Grey stands at it for a long moment, listening. Then, his shoulders finally relax a little bit. Then, he clears his throat and turns to look at her. He says, “You good?”

She says, “I’m totally fine.”

He nods in confirmation. She turns on music on the old-school stereo — romantic Naathi pop music from decades ago — to give them cover to talk and also to hide the lack of sex noises.

Grey spends the first hour or so taking inventory of the room, looking for signs that someone _lives_ in it, because sometimes what looks like sex trafficking is actually labor trafficking. Sometimes that is easier to prove. He kind of softly narrates out loud, what he is doing and what he looking for, for her benefit.

‘All night’ is probably going to be around three or four hours.

She watches him pull back the blanket and the sheets on the bed — and she winces as she watches him _smell it_. She watches him nod to himself. He mutters, “That hasn’t been washed in a while.”

She says, “Oh, ew.”

He says, “You can’t really catch anything from sitting on it,” right before he flips the blanket back over — and sits on it.

She is still standing in the middle of the room, just a few feet away from him.

And then he is smiling softly at her — his eyes kind of light in the dark room. His hands are folded over his lap. He asks her, “So, what do you think? About our second date. How are you enjoying it?”

She’s so struck by him and the ease in which he works, that she cannot even come up with a cool comeback. She cannot even start bantering with him. She cannot even blush over this. She just dumbly says, “Uhhh.”

 

  
  
  
  


Probably because of the events of the last few weeks and because of the irregular shifts messing with their sleep schedules — and because of the nature of the work — they both have sex dreams about each other.

She dreams about really unrealistic teleportation sex that morphs from one location to another seamlessly. She also dreams that she is being penetrated by him as she holds his body in a tight vice grip because she is scared of him disappearing right out from inside of her.

When she wakes up, with her heart beating fast and her body sweating in her sheets, she wonders how in the world she didn’t realize she was _dreaming_ , in the dream.

She also feels ashamed — not because sex occurred in her dream — that was very nice. She actually feels ashamed that her subconscious conjured up a penis for him. Like — what _is that fucking about?_

She wonders if she’s just a fucking terrible person then.

Funnily enough, he has the same type of dream. His is more efficient and succinct — it feels shorter. He dreams about his dick sometimes — but this is the first time he dreams it with her. He dreams that he is having sex with her like how he used to be able to have sex in the past — and when he wakes up, he feels pain. Like — physical pain mixed in with this phantom ache. He is often made to remember exactly what it used to feel like to have an erection. Sometime it convincingly feels like it’s _still_ _there_ , and he has to look down to confirm to himself that it is actually not _._ He usually just ignores it and tells himself that over time — his body and his mind will fucking forget, and he will finally get some peace.

He rolls over, almost expecting for his hard dick to be in the way. It is not. He thinks about how far his fucking gun is from him — and then he spends a restless number of hours unable to go back to sleep.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey totally does not tell Sam about his sex dream about Missandei at all — because it is not important. It is just a fucking dream — and the manifestation of it make sense to him. They are colleagues working together closely, in the exhausting nucleus of sex work. Of course reality morphs into the unrecognizable, when he gives his stupid brain a rest.

Instead, Grey — who is very sleep-deprived — thinks that he is doing a great job pushing his healing forward, as he tells Sam that work doesn’t hold the same sort of thrill that it used to, and that is alarming because it’s like, in losing his dick, he also lost his ability to find joy in the small things. Grey tells Sam that prostitute duty is actually a little boring and a lot depressing. What he is doing feels kind of pointless.

Sam has the clearance, so he tells Sam that it seems the local police force has been sampling — engaging in borderline sex acts with the sex workers before _not_ paying them, before arresting them instead. That fucks with their lives and ability to make money because then the sex workers have records. Grey can’t do anything about this obviously, because it’s not what his work is about, and he does not have the jurisdiction. There are also no clear laws against this, so there is actually nothing for him to enforce. This kind of thing is not typically a priority for leadership. He can only do what he’s been sanctioned to do. And right now, it feels pointless. He thought that work was going to _feel different_. He’s having a hard time that it’s not.

Grey tells Sam that it’s also been frustrating that a lot of the women don’t even want to fucking help themselves. They get pulled out and offered a path to like, legal work and a livelihood. And a lot of the time, they are like, no thanks. They would rather go back to abuse — like, what the fuck _is that?_

Sam is just listening because Grey is venting — and this sort of release is good — and Sam is observing that Grey has not yet made the connection, that his parents are similarly frustrated with him — for going back to his job when he had the option and the means to leave it.

Grey tells Sam that he _gets it._ He’s an immigrant too, so he gets it. He gets that a lot of the sex workers don’t speak the Common Tongue and were brought to Westeros specifically for sex work — so there’s that cultural brainwashing that they are contending with. Many of the sex workers don’t even believe they have been trafficked.

He also gets that going on the straight-and-narrow path is labor-intensive, boring, and there is risk that it will amount to nothing. He gets that, too.

He says, “It is all just really fucking depressing. It’s bumming me out.”

Then Grey silently congratulates himself for being so open about his emotions with another person. He has come a long way.

And when Sam refers to Grey’s compassion really casually in his response, it draws out this unexpected reaction. Sam says, “That’s the downside of your compassion. Sometimes it serves you well — like how easily you read and connect with people. Sometimes it can really bring us down, though, when we empathize too much with people. We start adopting their emotions as our own.”

Grey like, gets mad and really touchy about this. He doesn’t come right out and say that he is hurt or bothered or offended. He just starts shutting down, and he starts refuting and denying everything after that Sam says or offers. He starts saying, “You’re referring to affective empathy — I’m not an idiot. I’ve read a book before. And that’s actually _not_ me. I’m not trying to be defensive. I’m just saying, you’re wrong. I’m saying that objectively, affective empathy is not a strong quality of my personality.”

With his brows furrowed, Sam asks, “What just happened here? Something I said upset you. I’m sorry for that. Can you tell me what just happened here?”

What ensues from that request is a tense moment of thought — and Grey is putting in the effort to think because, at this point, Sam has earned this kind of effort and this kind of work — Sam has his trust.

Then, Grey’s body and his voice is tight and controlled, as he says, “I’m not soft and weak — and it _bothered_ me that you implied that. And I’m not _normal_ or _from here_ — and it bothered me that you talked to me like I’m _like you._ I’m . . . also not a good person. I’ve _done_ things.”

In response to all of that, Sam carefully makes a decision. He basically risks blowback, as he softly says, “Grey, being compassionate doesn’t make you weak. It actually means you are strong. It also speaks to your morals —”

“Okay, that’s some _white shit_ , right there!” Grey snaps heatedly.

“Do you think that the sex workers that you are coming across are weak and soft?” Sam presses. “Do you think they are abnormal for what they are doing, which is illegal under our laws? Do you think there is not any goodness in them, because of what they have done?”

  
  
  
  
  


Grey leaves Sam just fucking exhausted as hell, because Sam is such a crafty motherfucker. Grey ends up hitting the gym, so he can just beat out all of the thoughts and all of the feelings inside of him — because fucking Sam is actually right. Grey is actually secretly a bag of feelings. He just would like to fucking forget.

He remembers that he was less bogged down by this kind of ambiguity before he got his dick cut off. Like, beyond all of the obvious things, losing his dick has really changed him in ways he did not expect. He is constantly worried he’s bad at what he does now, because he is always second-guessing himself and he is always questioning his fucking _purpose_. He is worried that he is full of doubt now, because he’s been forever marked and scarred because of one fucking dead psychopath’s actions. He doesn’t think it’s fucking fair at all, but what does fair even have to do with anything?

He spends a quick hour in the gym. And then he is sweaty and ravenous — so he goes to the cafeteria before he bothers to shower.

He really wants to eat his shitty egg salad sandwiches by himself and just be the fuck alone — but Kojja is shouting at him to come over and is making a real big scene.

After he drags his feet over, she reaches out for a dap. She says, “Hello, brother from another mother.”

He says, “I wanted to eat alone.”

“Oh, we could tell,” she says, grinning. “I don’t care.” She kicks out a chair for him, this weird facsimile of chivalry.

After he sits down, Alayaya claps him on the shoulder heavily. She says nothing though. She is just trying to tell him, there there, cheer up.

“Oh damn, Nudho, it’s my nameday this weekend, remember?” Kojja announces, as if suddenly remembering herself. “You didn’t answer my email. But come through, okay? Xhondo is cleaning the house so it won’t look like shit threw up everywhere. My dad is cooking — you must be homesick for the food — starts at noon.”  She grins. “So show up at two.” She is smiling because Grey has a really terrible habit of being really punctual.

“I’m bringing punch!” Alayaya announces cheerfully. She means that she is bringing alcohol. And a lot of it.

  
  
  
  
  
  


When he arrives right at two, Missandei is a total girl about it. She didn’t really expect him, but she was _really_ hoping he’d show up, and she’s been watching the front door a lot for that reason. Daario has been talking to her and telling her about his stupid boat. Tyrion has also been telling her about his hypothetical winery that will never realistically come to fruition. They both sense that her attention is just _gone_ at a certain point. They follow her line of sight to the front door.

Tyrion patiently says, “Missy, your obsession is showing.”

Daario says, “Missy, if it helps you guys — I will volunteer myself as tribute, and you can close your eyes and pretend that I am him in bed. I will not be offended.”

“Um, I volunteer for that, too,” Tyrion says.

In response to this, Missy is already leaving them. She says, “Shut up! You’re both gross!” as she makes a serious beeline to Grey.

As they watch her leave, Alayaya pops her face in, letting them know she’s been eavesdropping a little. She says, “I like how she insists on playing hard to get. What a queen.” She looks at Daario. “Also, she is right. You’re gross.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He’s still in the middle of taking his shoes off when she pops up beside him and starts pulling the case of beer out of his hand. She says, “Hi!”

And he laughs as he gives up the case so that he can pick at his laces. He almost says, _what the fuck?_ But in actuality, he jokingly says, “Hey, man. What’s up? You’ve been waiting for me?”

She actually says, “Yeah!”

And he’s shaking his head — in mild disbelief. He’s trying not to look too directly at her face, in case it makes him smile like an idiot at her. He actually doesn’t get this _at all_. He doesn’t even get why she likes him _like this._

  
  
  
  
  
  


It takes him a while to loosen up and to really convince himself that he is not currently at work — he’s at a party. The problem is that there are _so many_ of his colleagues standing around him that he feels like he is at work. As he takes his beer back from Missandei, as he pushes through the crowd to load the bottles in a cooler or in the fridge, he ends up greeting like, a dozen people. He grins and touches hands with Yara, Alayaya, Balaq, Robb, Gendry, Sandor, and even Brienne, who he is surprised to see here.

He’s telling himself he’s allowed to mentally relax and not constantly track all of the consistencies and inconsistencies in the way people communicate. He’s allowed to answer honestly, when Tal pats him on the back and asks him what he’s been up to — outside of work.

But still, Grey automatically just starts smoothly deflecting and making himself sound normal by suddenly talking about how his parents are thinking about coming for a visit — when he realizes that Tal doesn’t even give a fucking shit about his lies. Tal also knows him — like, as a person.

So Grey clams up mid-statement. And then he clears his throat. He says, “Yeah, man, truthfully — I just bide time until it’s time for work again. I watch a lot of TV. I read. I work out. I eat. That’s about it.”

Tal is frowning. Because he thinks Grey’s life is sad.

“Seriously, man,” Daario says — now tipsy — now leaning heavily against Grey’s back from behind, his forearm curving down Grey’s chest. “I’m just saying — boat party? Boat party. Come on. Let’s do it. For real. Next weekend.”

“D and G stuck on a boat together — for hours,” Gendry says reasonably. “Yeah, sounds like a plan.”

“Okay, Waters, I hear yer asshurtedness — you wanna join, too. Fine.” Daario is slurring. “Shit. Waters! Boat! I just made the connection. It’s meant to be.”

“Words!” Gendry says, face flat and expressionless, save for that twinkle in his eye.

 _“Missandei!”_ Daario suddenly shouts — and she is not even that far away. She was walking behind Grey the entire time he pushed his way into the kitchen. She is standing right next to Grey right now. Nevertheless, Daario yells at her and says, “Do you want to sexually harass Grey on a boat next weekend!”

She actually appears to think about it. She looks off to the side and asks herself, “Umm, what am I doing next weekend?”  

Alayaya is cracking up. Because Missandei is just _really_ committing to this character of Grey's female stalker, and it’s really  _great._

“Hey.”

It’s Drogo — his deep, unimpressed voice is especially unmistakable these days because that voice just instills immediate anxiety in all of them.

Kojja actually invited the boss because she felt sorry for him — to the detriment of the everyone else’s good time.  

Drogo clears his throat. Then he says, “Can we not make jokes about sexual harassment to each other? I would rather not do . . . any paperwork.”

Daario holds onto Grey tighter — and Grey awkwardly allows himself to be pulled backwards — this feels like some sort of statement. He feels like a pawn right now. He feels like a human shield between Daario and Drogo.

“Why don’t you tell us what we’re _allowed_ to talk about then, on our personal time?” Daario says to Drogo, looking past Grey’s head.

“Oh, should I just go back home then?” Drogo returns, arching a brow. “Am I ruining your day?”

“Kind of,” Daario says.

They all expect Drogo to snap at Daario and just get all loud and angry — but actually, Drogo just appears to think it over for a little bit. And then he calmly says, “Okay.”

And then he turns around and pushes through the crowd — ostensibly leaving? Maybe?  

Grey feels Daario’s hold on him loosen. Grey winces as Daario shouts, “Other D! Come on! I was joking! Don’t be like that! Fuck!” And then to the rest of them, he rolls his eyes and says, “Why is he being so sensitive?”

  
  
  
  
  
  



	14. Missy vs. double standards

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy's flirting game is not the greatest, yet it manages to charm the future love of her life. Grey's parents think their son is in love with his colleague, and they have some feelings about it. Uh, and should we be worried about Drogo's health? He needs to quit smoking. And then Missy gets a break from pretend-sex work and gets to be wifey for a day. Lucky gal.

  
  
  


Bronn bugs Brienne into going and checking in on Drogo, presumably because she is closest to the porch door. She thinks it’s because she’s a woman and Bronn is a lazy asshole, so she gives him a hard stare for that — but she still goes along with what he wants anyway.

She comes back looking a little confused and bewildered. She tells them that Drogo is actually just smoking on the porch and joking around with Kojja’s dad and uncles. He is completely fine. He is not crying in a corner like what Daario was saying.

  
  
  
  


Drogo actually just doesn’t want to give a bunch of self-centered, petulant assholes the satisfaction of seeing just how fucking sick of this shit he is. He didn’t even want to show up to this party just to be a social pariah, but he got nostalgic. He remembers parties where a bunch of them got wasted together, burned furniture together, before picking themselves off the ground the day after to go hunt down some greasy diner food together.

A lot of things have changed since those days.

So he starts chain smoking. He also starts drinking in moderation. These are actually two things he has been trying to do less of. He was shocked after his last physical, when his doctor told him that his blood pressure and his cholesterol have been veering high. He told his doctor that that couldn’t be right because he works out like, all the time. He’s in really good shape.

His doctor told him that he _appears_ to be in good shape, but that he is going to need to take better care of himself and make some lifestyle changes in terms of diet and also stress management. And Drogo didn’t know what the fuck to make of that. His entire concept of himself has been upended.

So he’s been eating bullshit food like a white girl lately — quinoa and kale, without salt. He’s been trying to let certain vices go, even though sometimes his vices are the only things that bring him joy in life. He’s been trying to integrate yoga into his workouts. He’s been trying to meditate. He’s been trying to achieve some sort of work and life balance. He’s been trying to compartmentalize and leave some of it behind when he goes home. He has been seeing a therapist. He’s been trying to spend more time with the people who center him — a term his therapist uses. He’s been trying to be with his family and be with his non-work friends more. He has found that he cannot relate at all to his non-work friends.

This is also why he is at this stupid fucking party.

  
  
  


While Daario is still holding onto him, Grey lifts up his phone, puts it in selfie mode, and takes a picture of them together. He sees Daario automatically smile at the camera — so Grey smiles, too.

Gendry, who is politely watching, asks, “Oh, do you want me to take a photo of you two?” in the most stunningly non-judgmental, non-interested way possible.

Grey says, “Nah, it’s all good.” And then because he is trying to be more open about himself — because Sam has been telling him that he should try — he offers an explanation. He says, “My parents get on my ass sometimes about, um, my life. They don’t think I have fun or have friends. I’m trying to collect proof that I can send them, so they will shut the fuck up.”

“Aw,” Daario says. “I like your folks. Will you tell them I said hello?”

“Okay,” Grey says, with his face pointed down at his phone screen. He is composing the message to his folks right on the spot. “My parents think I’m gay,” he adds. “So this picture is definitely going to cause them focus on that for a while and have some _conversations_ between the two of them. This photo is gonna help me get a fucking _break_ from them for a while _.”_

Daario laughs. He says, “Are you _serious?_ You’re gonna get your parents hopes up like that and let them believe I’m going to be their future son-in-law?”

Grey just says, “Yeah.”

“Wow, okay,” Tal says. “So I’m standing right here, and you’re gonna act like I’m not standing right here? You’re gonna act like I’m not a viable candidate for being your pretend-lover? Like, we’re just not gonna address this at all?”

“Yeah.”

In response to Grey’s utter non-response to _that_ bit of levity — Grey is still typing out his message to his folks — Tal leans over and smacks Grey in the arm. Grey doesn’t even flinch.

Tal says, _“Nudho!_ Maybe instead of working so hard to _appear_ human, maybe you should just actually _be_ a person and laugh at my jokes.”

“Why don’t you actually be funny then? Then maybe I will laugh one of these days,” Grey mutters.

“I’m the top, by the way,” Daario announces to Grey. “You’re the bottom, _obviously.”_

“I honestly do not know why you’re friends with him,” Missandei chimes in, also talking to just Grey. She’s trying to keep her voice light and even, though in truth, she finds Daario extremely annoying when he drinks.

“Proximity and convenience,” Grey explains, as he finally hits send on his phone. “You’re friends with him, too.”

  
  
  
  


Grey is seriously all partied out after a whopping hour. He already ate all of the delicious food that Kojja’s dad made. He already said his hellos to all of the elders that he doesn’t know. And then he said hello to all of the coworkers that he _does_ know. He has already made small talk with a guy about ice and how to freeze ice so it’s clear.

Grey has had _enough_.

He finds the aimlessness of socializing to be really uncomfortable and kind of anxiety-inducing. He doesn’t want to drink today because the last time he drank, he tried to have sex with Alayaya and that proved to be really unsuccessful because he completely freaked out. The time he drank _before that_ he got himself arrested.

So he is kind of nervous about how not-well he operates under the influence these days.

He came here to prove something to himself and to his parents. He feels like he has fulfilled both missions, so he just tries to quietly sneak out the front door and just leaves before the cake is cut and before any presents get opened. He didn’t get Kojja a present anyway.

He steps into his shoes quickly and delays lacing them up because he doesn’t want to get caught. He’s already got his hand on the doorknob.

Nonetheless — because she’s been avidly watching him all night — she catches him with, “Hey, are you heading out?”

He freezes momentarily. And then he says, “Yeah, I’m tired.”

“I’ll walk you to your car.”

  
  
  
  


It seriously takes five seconds to walk to his car, where it is parked next to the curb in front of Kojja’s house. They cross the lawn silently together, with him feeling her cast this glance at his face as his pulse starts to speed up just a little bit.

He’s been thinking a lot lately, about a lot of things — but mostly simultaneously how short and how long life is. Life is short because it can be extinguished at any moment — and that is it. Life is just done. He thought he knew this when he was a college kid signing up for what he thought was a life’s purpose. But the thing about youth is how short-sighted and how much it lacks context and breadth and wisdom. He has had many close calls and he’s killed enough people to have known — but he actually didn’t realize how fragile life really is until death was immediate and right in his face. He is learning that is it hard to come back from that. It is hard to care about things, after that.

He thinks that life is long because he survived. And he is just useless now, and destined to just carry on as this person who has been maimed, physically and psychologically. Youth was a blessing because when he was young, he was too stupid to know what he stood to lose. Youth was also a blessing because when he was young, he was stupid enough to believe in the lies that they fed him. Now he knows better, and after knowing — what is even left for him — a paycheck? Something to kill the boredom? Is he going to do this for the next ten years? The next twenty? Or maybe just until he makes a grave error and just kicks the bucket randomly — because he is now a person that views life and death as random. None of it really matters. None of it actually holds purpose.

Sam keeps telling Grey that he is depressed. Even then, Grey doesn’t care. Though he supposes that is the nature of the beast.

He feels embarrassed by the way she looks at him sometimes. He feels embarrassed by how it looks — like, it looks comical, and it looks like he is being mocked or something — and he is left kind of wondering why she’d mock him like this, because all signs point to her being a pretty nice person. He also feels embarrassed by how she kind of makes him feel sometimes. He refuses to define or qualify it. He just has been telling himself he doesn’t like it, and it’s a little bit cruel and unfair.

This is why he quickly says, “Okay, well thanks. I made it to my car. That was harrowing. Thanks for being a friend.” His hand is reaching for the door handle.

And she ends up reaching out with her hand and pushing on his door, keeping it shut. She is staring at him.

He says, “Ummm . . . what’s happening right now?”

She is nonplussed by that response. She just asks, “Where are you going?”

“Home.”

She says, “Oh,” as she appears to think about that.  “What are your plans for the rest of the night?”

Honestly, he’s probably going to try to sleep early so that this fucking weekend will just _end_. Out loud, he says, “Just chill.”

“I mean, I have nothing going on for the rest of the night either,” she says.

He says, “Oh, cool.”

“We should hang out together.”

He is shaking his head. He is saying, “You’re funny. Like for real. Like, low-key funny. Like, it’s not a laugh out loud funny. It’s like, a half-smile-oh-you-amused-me kind of funny.”

Predictably — and it’s anxiety-relieving because often the things he says ends up offending women more than anything else — her demeanor and her face cracks and this loud, staccato beacon of light beams out. She’s laughing — she’s snorting, she’s trying to cover her face with her hand because the adorable snort surprised her — he’s reaching out to grab her wrist, to keep her face uncovered. He watches it flush — darken a little bit. He watches her eyes go shiny from exertion-tears.  

She shoves him with her free hand. His feet stay firmly planted on the ground, but he sways back a little bit. His hand on her wrist tightens.

She exclaims, “You’re not going to neg me into liking you!” Then she adds, “It’s too late anyway. I’m already a little too obsessed. Like, you should fear for your life. Like, you should be worried I want to carve out your insides and sleep in your skin like it’s a sleeping bag.”

  
  
  
  


They probably spend five hours talk-flirting out there by his car like that — or realistically, just five minutes. She loses track of time because she is trying to remember every fucking micro moment of this so that she can tell her journal _all about it_ later.

He is working so hard not to give her the satisfaction of actually laughing at the things she says. She keeps telling him about the ways that she would murder and mutilate his body — with knives! — to get a semi-sexual release from it.

He keeps muttering, “Oh my God, what are you saying to me right now,” as he repeatedly breaks eye contact to look at electrical poles and power lines — just anything but her face because he’s afraid that he will crack up and condone this shit coming out of her face.

And then — watching his face — her tone and her mood flips really fast — it softens — she asks, “You studied literature in college — how come? Do you like to read?” She asks because she has been wanting to know.

His eyes widen in mild surprise — at the abrupt change in topic. His lashes flutter as he recovers. He realizes that she has read his file and she has apparently memorized parts of it, which actually isn’t that weird. He knows stuff about everyone else, too. It’s normal in their work.

And then he actually answers her. He says, “Yeah, I loved reading a lot when I was a kid. My parents are teachers — but you know that — and yeah. They had access to lots of books for that reason.”

She is smiling encouragingly at him.  

He clears his throat and blinks hard. He decides to reciprocate. He asks her, “When did you know you liked learning languages?”

“Oh!” she says thoughtfully. “It was through bootleg soap operas!”

She tells him that there were video stores all over Naath that carried pirated copies of foreign content, some dubbed, some subtitled. Her mother loved soaps, but Naath doesn’t have a robust filmmaking culture or the infrastructure and money to support that kind of business, so that’s why they pirate other content. She tells him she grew up watching soaps cuddled up with her mom. And that was how they all figured out she had a gift for language acquisition.

He thinks it’s a really, really cute story — and she thinks she might muster up the courage — _again_ — to ask him to grab a cup of coffee somewhere.

And that’s about when Drogo's large and broad body appears from the backyard and marches across the front lawn. He takes in their presence casually, even though he didn’t expect to see them. He says, “Hey, guys. You heading out, too?”

  
  
  
  


Drogo is too in his own head that he doesn’t realize he is really aggravating Missy by being a major cockblock right now. He doesn’t see past her polite inquiries and her blank face at all — it is all too subtle for him — as he asks if it’s okay before he lights up a cigarette.

Missy is like, oh great, so he’s going to be here for a bit.

And then Drogo starts talking about work. His eyes are far away as he mutters out procedural things, as he mutters through the list of things he needs to get through in the next week.

Grey says, “Yeah, I don’t miss those parts of the job at all.”

“You were so good at it,” Drogo says, sucking in so the tip of his cigarette glows red, releasing smoke out of the side of his mouth and nostrils. “Fuck. I really need to quit. I’m apparently on a bullet train headed toward heart disease if I don’t cut this shit out.”

And with disgust, he sucks in another puff of smoke — he’s still got half of the cigarette to go — before he rips the thing out of his mouth, drops it on the ground, and extinguishes it.

Grey actually stoops down to pick up the butt. He explains, “I’ll throw it away in the garbage,” before he leaves them to head to Kojja’s bins.

Drogo just shakes his head, watching Grey’s departing back. Because he _misses_ Grey.

Then he says, “What’s up with you, Missy? How is life when you aren’t being terrorized by your terrible boss?”

  
  
  
  


She was never bullied for real when she was younger. She had a good core group of friends and she was popular in her school. Her brothers occasionally hassled her, but they also fiercely protected her against any would-be bullies. Everyone in her grade were scared and in awe of her brothers.

This is why it took her so long to figure out that if she just leaned into the shit-talking, then it makes it way less fun for people and they will eventually shut up.

Everyone, even Daario, has been bugging her less about her crush on Grey because she has been strategically copping to it. She’s making fun of herself so that they don’t have to. She’s learning this old schoolyard technique way too late.

The downside of this is that even Grey thinks it’s a joke. Even _she_ thinks its a joke sometimes.

Like, it’s five in the morning and they are about to part ways and just crash for hours to recover from stress-filled sleep deprivation. He has his bag hooked over his shoulder as he walks out of the briefing room and toward the elevators. She smells like flowery perfume and dried sweat as she follows behind him, her windbreaker rustling.

They tiredly ride up to the garage together. He yawns widely. She sympathetically yawns, too.

When the doors open, he lightly pats her on the arm before walking out. He says, “See you later, baby,” before he walks out and heads to his car without a backwards glance. It’s a joke. Because they are coming off a shift of prostitute duty.

She calls out with, “Have a good nap, lover!” because she knows it will make him cringe.

  
  
  
  


It takes her twenty-five minutes to get home. She sleepily stops at a gas station to fill up her tank and also to grab a carton of milk for coffee and tea. Her gun rests heavy against her ribcage as she makes polite small talk with the gas station attendant who is just starting his shift. He is not into her pleasantries, but he is nice enough.

The entire city feels like it’s still slumbering — the roads are clear and wet from the recent drizzle — as her feet feel heavy and gritty as she tracks a little bit of mud into her foyer.

Her dad is already up because he keeps early hours — which is regretful. She wishes he’d sleep in, but years of training has not left his body. The few people who know what her dad did — who aren’t in the same line of work — often ask her what it was like to grow up with him as a father. They imagine that his life was exciting and adrenaline pumping — that it must’ve been hard for him to slow down and be a father when he was around his family.

But he was actually a really, really good father. There were long days when he didn’t come home at all — and those days used to really worry their mother. There were weeks when he didn’t eat dinner with them at all, and their mother just had to hold it down by herself.

But when he was present, he was all-in. He was attentive and responsive, probably because he really felt that the time they had was really special and finite.

Missy understands that her dad is of a certain generation. And he does believe that this job is not made for women. He doesn’t think that she can have this job and a husband, for instance, because how can a husband put up with this schedule and the absence of his wife? Her dad also doesn’t think that women in this job should have children — because it’s really irresponsible and bad for the children to be so far away from their mother.

She doesn’t actually think her dad is wrong. He is probably very right. It’s a little unfair because he got to have a family and a partner. And her brothers both have families and partners. And it’s just . . . really hard for her to date anyone. Because her dad is right. It is unfair because the world is just unfair. The fact of the matter is that few men are willing to put up with this shit. She will probably have to make a hard decision for herself at one point — family and kids? — or her career?

Or maybe she will be killed on the job and the dilemma will become moot.

When her aunties ask about whether or not she’s lonely being such a single career gal, she’d laugh along with them and would secretly feel very lucky and slightly superior to them. They were stuck being housewives because it’s that generation. She has so many options and so much opportunity. She is not really looking for what they have at all.

But she is lonely. Sometimes. And she misses sex, which is funny because sex is in her face constantly through the work she does. But she does miss being close to someone else in that way.

She literally has no time to date though.

“Do you want some tea?” her dad calls out softly. “Do you want to tell me about your day?”

She laughs. And she’s exhausted, but she still drops her bag down at her feet before she trudges into the kitchen. Her face must be terrifyingly ghoulish to her dad — like, she must actually look like a sad prostitute to him.

She looks at the plate of biscuits, the tiny jar of homemade jam, and the dish of butter neatly arranged on the table. There is a folded napkin and a tiny plate and also silverware ready for her. She says to him, “Daddy, you’re such a good wife!”

He rolls his eyes at her.

  
  
  
  


Grey’s folks start asking after Daario, which is really fucking hilarious to him because his parents won’t come right out and say anything directly. His folks just keep inquiring about his friend and how his friend is doing. He keeps telling his parents that his friend is fine. He feeds the stupid fire by telling his folks that he and Daario are planning on going on Daario’s boat soon — finally.

On the side, he texts and video messages with his brother, who faithfully tells Grey the truth about what is actually going on at home — Azzie tells Grey their folks are actually freaking out a fair bit over their youngest’s latent homosexuality.

Azzie tells Grey, “Mom keeps saying weird shit about how maybe your work accident made you gay. And I’m like, ‘Mom, it doesn’t work like that. And you’re a teacher! Of young, impressionable kids! For Christ’s sake!’ And Mom is like, ‘I know, I know. That’s not what I meant.’ Um, baby bro, I think Mom and Dad might be slightly homophobic?”

Grey sleepily laughs into the palm of his hand. He mutters, “Who isn’t?”

  
  
  
  


Grey glances at her sardonically as he swirls the Chardonnay in his glass. He is backlit in buttery light. There is the cloudless sky and soft crests of hills patterned with rows and rows of vines behind him. He sniffs his glass, takes a sip, and then says, “Hm, primarily tart green apples with some underlying vanilla and oak. Rather ordinary, don’t you think, sweetheart?"

She is trying to keep her amusement down at giggling levels, not at belly laughing levels. She thinks that this is a very, very nice change from prostitute duty, though it does present certain challenges and certain downsides.

Her fat and fake wedding ring is glittering under the dusky sunlight as she pulls her own wine glass to her mouth and takes a modest sip. She’s trying not to lose her vice grip on sobriety here.

She near-silently whispers to him, “It tastes grape-y.”

“Aw, you’re embarrassing to me!” he says, his voice also low. Unlike him, she didn’t have the capacity or the ability or the talent or the brainpower to memorize the entire fucking wine catalogue.  

  
  
  
  
  



	15. Missy puts foot in mouth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy gets to play pretend-wife to the future love of her life. She learns that he is very romantic. Then, Missy gets to go on a boat with the future love of her life. She learns that she's incredibly adaptable and not at all socially awkward. Finally, Missy's habit of being a ride-or-die bitch may have landed her in hot water with the future love of her life.

  
  
  
  
  
  


They spend seven lengthy days touring different wineries, ostensibly on the first leg of their honeymoon. Her cover is as a marketing manager for a big-box store. He is a high-level investment banker at a large firm. This cushy job is a reward of sorts, from Drogo — for putting up with the long night hours on prostitute duty.

They both have done about a month of preparation for this ongoing engagement. It involves brushing up on pages and pages of updated procedures and protocols. It involves hours and hours of run-through. It also includes rote memorization on their backstory and jobs. This is actually why Grey is the primary on this job and Missandei is his support. Few people in the organization can absorb copious amounts of complex and technical information like Grey can. Missandei is his wife because she looks like she would blend in well as his wife, they happen to work well together, and conveniently, they have largely the same working schedule due to the ongoing prostitution job.     

She learned off the bat that this is not going to be fun at all. This is not a vacation at all even though they are in the beautiful Dorne countryside. She learns that there is zero budget for this, so she has to pull her nicest clothes out of her own closet. They are not armed at all. And any moment when they are alone or are not actively working, Grey has his face shoved in a computer or a tablet. He is constantly reading, preparing, and recommitting information to memory. He is also constantly going through case files, looking for inconsistencies or potential points of interest — potential leads.

He is an incredible workhorse. His focus makes her feel like lazy garbage all the time. She feels bad whenever her eyes start aching from staring at a screen for too long. She feels bad when she falls asleep on him in the hotel room and she wakes up hours later with her body tucked underneath the sheet and blanket, her laptop closed and charging on the nightstand.

She doesn’t know when he sleeps — because she never sees him sleep.

Their daylight hours are spent on an exhausting schedule. They get up early at sunrise and do group tours — outings in which she and Grey are constantly socializing and talking to people, trying to suss out who could be developed into an organizational asset. He does most of the talking — he talks intricately about wine, he talks about football with a stunning amount of authentic-looking engagement — and she knows he hates football because he told her so on the flight over — and he brags about his job and his ability to quickly secure equity financing for IPOs. He sounds ridiculously obnoxious and charismatic, and she _can’t believe_ what she is hearing come out of his mouth sometimes.

His lies sound so naturalistic — and before this, she would think that it was effortless, but she has been seeing how he _doesn’t sleep_ , so she now realizes that what he does actually requires _a lot_ of effort and it is _awe-inspiring._

“Taking a year studying abroad in Pentos really broadened my horizons,” Grey tells this older couple. “I highly recommend it for your son. It’s _so valuable_ to see how other people live, you know? Beyond learning about other cultures, it makes you appreciate what you have _so much_ more.”

“That’s funny that you mention that!” Jon tells Grey. “We were _just_ telling our Robin about that. Weren’t we, darling?”

“We were!”

“Well, let me give you my card,” Grey offers, pulling out the flap of his blazer, grinning widely. “Let him know that he can call me anytime with questions. Also, anytime you need some Pentoshi food recommendations, feel free to reach out! I am pretty sure I ate my weight triple times over in lobster. They are known for this spiny variety that is very sweet and buttery.”

“That sounds absolutely amazing!” Lysa says.

“It sure was! Poor Jenny can’t eat any because she is allergic to shellfish,” Grey says, reaching out to touch Missandei’s hip, softly guiding her closer to his body. “But it’s okay! I eat more than enough for the both of us.”

“You certainly do, babe,” she says, smiling at him softly. And it is a real smile — she can tell he is exhausted and is just running on fumes right now. She presses a hand over his sternum, letting her fake diamond sparkle, before leaning over to give him a peck on the cheek.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Once the door to their hotel room closes, she starts kicking off her heels and undoing her updo. She asks him if it’s okay for her to shower first, even though he always, always insists that she go first.

He mutters, “Yep,” as he starts unbuttoning his dress shirt. He has been sweating all day underneath the blazer and acting like it’s not uncomfortable as fuck.

By the time she comes back out again — hair damp and dripping a little into her nightshirt, which is just a loose t-shirt — he is back to staring at his computer screen and sucking down water from a bottle. The laptop casts a blue glow over his face, reflected in his glasses.

She says, “All yours.”

He absently mumbles, “Awesome, thanks,” as his eyes stay glued to the screen.

She rubs lotion on her bare legs for about five minutes, sitting on the bed before he finally gets up, digs around in his suitcase, and then walks into the bedroom.

She speculates that because he has to expend such an incredible amount of energy and effort toward being socially adept during the day, he is just spent by night time. He typically doesn’t say more than five words to her after nine o’clock.

She’s lying down, in bed and under the covers, by the time he walks out of the bathroom. She has her eye mask already on, and her hands are folded over her stomach, on top of the covers. She puts her mask on so that she can easily sleep, so that he doesn’t have to feel bad about keeping the lights on as he continues working.

  
  
  
  
  
  


When they are finally back home — after a flight delay that left them stuck in Sunspear for an extra night — she fades back into her regular and repetitive routine. She gets up early for a jog, before the sun is fully up and the sky is still bleeding a little pink. She reads and answers emails first thing at work. She spends hours at her desk poring over data. She posts to her fake social media accounts — photos of her fake self and her handsome fake husband looking fake happy on their fake honeymoon. She rips the captions and hashtags from real accounts of friends from college that she is no longer close with because they have nothing in common anymore. Jojen has secured her hundreds and hundreds of fake friends and followers for the accounts.

Missy hits the gym for another run after that. And then she changes her clothes and goes from massage parlor to massage parlor, trying to cultivate new relationships with the owners. After that, she sometimes swings by a few strip clubs and talks to the bosses. On some days when she’s not fake prostituting, she gets her nails done with a new friend that she has made. And occasionally she has to do something weird. Like, once, she had to babysit a woman’s four-year-old son for like, three hours while his mom was off doing God knows what.

Back at headquarters on a Thursday, she sets her tray of food down in the cafeteria, between Daario and Gendry, Daario nudges her and jokingly asks her how her super romantic getaway with Grey went. They haven’t seen each other in over a week because he was working in Highgarden.

In response, she give him a withering look. She says, “He literally worked the entire time. I literally had no opportunity to sexually harass him. He gave me no opening.”

Daario chuckles appreciatively at that.

She keeps milking this joke because, sad as it is, this is the closest she has ever been to being one of the guys. She keeps up this joke because everyone except Drogo seems to enjoy it.

“Yeah, man,” Robb interjects, cutting a slice into his reheated lasagna. “I was based in Yunkai with him and Clegane for three months about five years ago? Let me tell you —” Robb pauses. “A fun time was had by all. His discipline is incredible.”  

  
  
  
  
  
  


Sam has suggested to him, many times, that he should work at having better life-work balance. He has told Sam that his work-life balance is as good as it’s ever been. He’s like, about to go on a boat with Daario. For _fun._

Nevertheless, he tells his parents that he is going to buy them two plane tickets to King’s Landing during the school break. He’s going to put them up in a nice hotel. He will take a week off to sightsee with them.

They counter this. They tell him that they don’t want to stay in a nice hotel. They don’t want to do any sightseeing because they’ve visited him many times over the years already. They tell him that they want to stay with him, they want to take care of him, they want to cook all of his favorite foods and have it ready when he gets home from work, they want to see his life and how he has resettled, and they want to stay a little bit longer than a week.

“Like, how long?” he asks, through the screen.

“Maybe a month or two?”

“Like, the entire break?” he asks carefully.

“Is it going to be an imposition?” his dad asks — voice deep and targeted.

This sounds like a fucking test. So Grey calls their bluff. He says, “No. And sure. Come stay for awhile. It will be nice to be roommates again.”

“We’re not your roommates,” his mom says, her face and tone utterly humorless.

“We’re your parents,” his dad adds, completely clarifying needlessly.

“Oh good,” he says lightly, looking absently at the lone nail on his wall — a present that the last tenant of his apartment left for him. “We’re having a good time together already.” He is going to need to buy so much shit to populate this place. He is going to need to go to IKEA so that this place doesn’t look like a sociopath lives here.

  
  
  
  
  


Daario’s boat is crazy. And Grey should not have expected anything less. It is a rickety old thing that smells like mold, turpentine, and vinyl. Truly the person he feels especially bad for is Missandei, who shows up with a two-piece bathing suit under her clothes, expecting this to be like, a normal boating experience. Her face comically drops into a look of horror and disbelief, as Daario holds out his arms widely and says, “Ta-da! Welcome to Chez Naharis!”

Missandei says, “Oh my God.”

She says this at the same time that Gendry starts cracking up loudly and clapping his hands, saying, “Yes! Yes! Yesss!”

Daario throws a smelly lifejacket at her and then graciously offers her a seat as first mate — aka the seat directly behind him on the driver’s side. Grey and Gendry are both pretty familiar with boats, so they start untying rope and gently pushing bumpers as Daario starts up his engine with a loud roaring gurgle and a puff of smoke.

Again, Missandei looks horrified. Again, she says, “Oh my God.”

Daario has this ancient boombox — no lie — tied down with rope against a wall railing, to drown out the sound of the engine. After they back away from the dock, Daario starts blaring Dolly Parton without like, any shame or self-consciousness at all.

Gendry is standing in the hull, behind Daario, who is loudly singing as he drives a little erratically with an opened tallboy of beer in hand. Gendry is staring directly at Grey, who is still stuck on the bow, from where he pulled up bumpers. Gendry is covering his mouth to stop himself from laughing, to keep his composure. He is pretty sure that he and Grey are both thinking the same thing.

They are both realizing that their longtime colleague and friend is like . . . a redneck. Like all of the pieces are clicking into place. Daario’s nomadic, shitty upbringing. His shitty alcoholic mother. The way he dances and tries to rap.

“Torgo!” Daario shouts, swatting in the direction of Grey, who is kind of blocking Daario’s view. “Get in here! Come on, brother! It’s a _party!_ Let’s _party!_ Grab yourself a brewski! _”_

“Oh,” Grey says, muttering more to himself than anyone else. “Okay.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Daario’s earnestness, hospitality, and enthusiasm actually makes for a really, really lovely time. He slaps Grey on the butt and lets Grey drive the boat as fast as Grey wants — which isn’t really that fast because Grey is not really a thrillseeker — and Daario dramatically rips off his cutoff shirt, revealing a really fit, really athletic build — with a slight sunburn.

He catches Missandei looking at him — or glaring at him because she still has not gotten over what is happening to her right now — and he rakishly grins. He gestures to his torso and he says, “Try not to fall in love with me, okay? Try to keep your hands off, okay?”

Her frown deepens.

After they stop, Daario throws out a inner tube that he has tied to the boat. He is screaming over Dolly as he tells them that the tube can fit two people, maybe three if they get cozy. Then, with a whoop, he just runs and jumps off the boat, cannonballing into the water.

When he resurfaces, he shouts to Gendry. He shouts, “Toss me a beer!”

And Gendry faithfully does.

After that, Grey and Gendry just submit to this. They both start stripping down at a really leisurely pace, down to just their swim trunks. Grey mutters to Gendry that he hasn’t done this since his accident — and it’s vague enough that Gendry and Missandei don’t know what specific thing he is referring to — whether it’s swimming, taking off some of his clothes around other people, being on a boat, doing a cannonball?

He actually dives into the water.

And then he starts swimming around, really casually and naturally — it is immediately really obvious that he is a really excellent swimmer.

Gendry splashes in soon after.

And Missandei is left on the boat, gingerly holding the bright orange lifejacket against her breasts, telling them, “I don’t want to get my hair wet! I don’t want to get my hair wet!” before she begrudgingly ties it back with a hair band.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Daario feeds them hot dogs as they wait for the sun to set, hot dogs that he cooks on a gas grill in the back of the boat. Grey is snapping a picture of Daario cooking his dinner to send to his parents, as Gendry explains to them that there’s this delicious stew he grew up on in the Flea Bottom district. It was made up of cut up hot dogs, hot dog water, leftover kitchen scraps and trimmings, and stale bread cubes to thicken it up.

Gendry smacks his lips, at the memory, and says, “Yummy. And it’s never the same twice!”

“Well, that sounds disgusting,” Grey says, taking a big bite out of his hot dog and bun, holding half of it in his cheek.

“No, man, trust me,” Gendry insists. “I’ll have you over for dinner one of these days. I’ll make it for you. It will be romantic.”

“Oh, you think you can beat Theon Greyjoy in the romantic dinner department?” Grey asks, chewing through his food. “Wow. Cocky.”

Missy has been struggling to keep up with them all day. She’s been struggling to be comfortable on this really, really smelly boat even though she is disgusted just touching her feet to the _wet_ carpet. She was uncomfortable sitting in a rubber inner tube. She’s been self-conscious over what a priss and princess she apparently is. She cannot think of jokes fast enough. She cannot think of funny quips fast enough. She is not even in the right frame of mind to jokingly hit on Grey — it is much harder with an audience.

She cannot banter with them. She cannot even carry her end of the conversation. She has just been rather quiet all day. This feels a lot like how it is when she is hanging out with her dad and brothers. Ever since they lost their mom, she’s kind of been odd one out.

The best that she can currently offer is, “Did you know that I ate a hotdog for the first time in college?”

There is kind of a pause after that pronouncement.

And then Daario says, “Oh, cool, Missy.”

And then Grey says, “D, can I have another?” He is talking about another hot dog.

“Sure, buddy.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


After her sub-tacular performance on boat day, after Daario caught Grey and Missy coming off a tiring operation the other night — after he watched Grey offer Missy his hand in a high five and saw Missy completely and totally miss hitting Grey’s hand in the five — well, Daario leans over her shoulder right before a meeting with Selmy and he boings one of her curls. He then whispers to her, “Hey, champ — a heads up, but I think you are friendzoning yourself pretty hard with that one, eh?” Daario directs his gaze to Grey, who is sitting across the table, looking down into his coffee cup. He seems weirdly perturbed by whatever he is looking at.   

Missy scoffs and gives Daario this look of disgust, because she does not even have time before this meeting to explain to him how insulting to women the term “friendzoned” is. Also, she is _not_ getting friendzoned. She is still pretty firmly in the “more than” territory. She doesn’t even have time to explain this to fucking Daario.

“Okay, let’s go over statuses,” Drogo says to all of them, at the top of the hour.

  
  
  
  
  
  


So Missy ends up friendzoning herself real fucking hard with Grey in the cafeteria. From her vantage point, it is completely unexpected and it comes from absolutely out of nowhere — she couldn’t have anticipated it at all. Best of all, it happens with an audience, so there are many, _many_ witnesses to watch her crash and burn.

It comes about when they are all ripping on one of their favorite topics: How much of a fucking boob Drogo is these days. Bronn kicks it off by telling them that Drogo completely got on his ass because he sent in his reports like, half a fucking day late. Yara says, “Oh my _God_ ,” and then tells them that Drogo has figured out how to write the most passive aggressive emails ever, because he’s been trying to be more . . . cheery? Alayaya tells them that Drogo is _obsessed_ with the filing system —

“Actually, that’s important,” Grey cuts in. “Best practices need to be followed so that the files are organized and easily referenced —”

“Boo!” Daario says loudly, throwing his crumpled, used napkin at Grey’s face. “Boo!”

“I’m just saying —”

“Boo!”

Grey shuts his eyes as another wadded napkin hits his face. He cracks a small smile — he huffs out a short laugh — because he gets it. He gets that no one wants to hear him defend the boss.

He says, “Alright, alright. I hear ya. But come on — Drogo has a hard job, guys. He’s doing his best. And you know — it could be worse. Like, he could be _Daenerys.”_

“And what exactly do you mean by that?” Missandei interjects.

All gazes — including Grey’s — flip right to her. Half of the table is remembering that Missy and Dany are like, bffs. The other half of the table just never forgot this factoid.

So very deliberately, with months and months worth of resentment and bitterness pressing down on his shoulders, Grey waves his hand despondently in between their bodies. He casually says, “Well, instead of doing _actual work_ , Drogo could be walking around in designer suits, parroting dumbass sound bytes to press about the state of the organization even though he doesn’t even have a fucking _clue_. At least Drogo isn’t doing _that_.”

What results is a lengthy, context-heavy, and awkward pause.

Missy swallows the lump in her throat.

And then she says, “Wow.” And that is all she says for now.

Grey’s eyes narrow just the teeniest bit. He says, “Am I wrong?”

She shrugs delicately.

And then she says, “I’m just surprised that you feel that way. I mean, if it weren’t for her — you — you wouldn’t —”

“I wouldn’t have a job?” he supplies, letting it roll effortlessly off his tongue. “Wouldn’t even be _alive_? Wouldn’t have gotten out _mostly intact._ Sure. I guess I was following some other person’s order to engage with Bolton. You are _right_ , Missandei _._ I _should_ be _grateful.”_

The entire table is like, _so tense_ now.  
  


  
  
  
  


She retains her composure for the rest of the day. She pulls on a stretchy, skin-tight tank top and skirt, and she stands outside on a street corner as he waits nearby in a baseball cap. She looked within herself and she has decided that she still trusts him — with her life. So they are carrying on with this.

At the end of the shift, he tiredly tells her, “Good job,” before he packs up his gear into his bag and heads up to the parking garage.

She makes the decision to wait a minute before she heads to the elevator, to go up to the same garage.

It’s when she arrives home, after her dad smiles at her with such gentleness and tells her that her clothes are folded and put away, that she kind of breaks down a little bit. Her eyes fill with tears. It’s probably dark enough that he might not notice. And she blinks them away furiously as she quickly thanks him, wishes him a good night, and trots up the stairs.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	16. Grey is a righteous asshole

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chap, we see the darker side of our boy — his violent talents and his extreme commitment to excellence. People continue underestimating the shit out of Missy. Grey goes to IKEA to prove that he's totes normal. And then he craps all over Missy because she kind offff made a mistake? Missy tries to convince herself that she ain't down with that kind of abuse — but obvs she finds it kind of hot. And then Grey's parents come to town!

  
  


 

 

She arrives on time and with a wrapped present, for her niece’s nameday party. It is an auspicious nameday — it is the first. In the old days, this marked a Naathi child surviving past the harrowing first year, back when babies were especially vulnerable due to infection, disease, malnutrition, and general lack of information. Nowadays, it’s a cultural ritual.

She bought her brother and sister-in-law a pricey juicer. Because maybe they can make baby Bee juices. Or maybe her sister-in-law will enjoy having a healthy glass of disgusting carrot juice as she breastfeeds Bee.

Missy tends to buy her family members expensive gifts, in a misguided attempt to get them to stop feeling so fucking sorry for her. There’s nothing to feel sorry about. She has a nice job. It pays her well so she has a nice place to live. She has a nice number of close friends, the ranks of which are growing by the day. And she is kind of incrementally and iteratively saving the lives of vulnerable human trafficking victims and sex workers, slowly but surely. Like, she is pretty heroic.

“Missandei!” one of her aunties says when she spots her. “I am so surprised to see you here, dear! Have you been sleeping? You look tired.”

  


 

  
  


Drogo “lends” Grey to Arya’s department because Sandor’s ice-fishing vacation to Bear Island comes at an inopportune time and cannot be deferred again — not after Sandor put down a fat deposit on a cabin, coordinated the schedules for this reunion of his ex-special forces buddies — not after months and months of Sandor’s expressed dissatisfaction and his reticence to renegotiate his contract in order to re-up. Arya tells Drogo that they need to keep Clegane happier or else Clegane is going to walk soon.

So Drogo reluctantly offers up his man whose potential is currently severely underutilized. Drogo does not think this is healthy for Grey, but Drogo is not the guy’s shrink.

He _does_ talk to Grey’s shrink about it, who is frustratingly noncommittal, fucking saying shit like, “It could be bad for him,” and “Or maybe he will be fine. Just ask him if he wants to.”

It only affirms to Drogo the thing that Grey used to say to him all the time: That quacks are fucking useless.

When Drogo asks Grey if Grey would like to take on a quick engagement that will last two days max — under Arya’s command — Grey generally knows what the engagement is about. Drogo tells him that he will bank bonus time off for helping Arya in a pinch. The bonus time might help when Grey’s parents come to visit.

None of them ever spend all of their vacation time. It is hard to in their line of work. The organization knows it, and that is why bonus time is often floated as a reward. Grey knows this — he used to offer people bonus time in lieu of financial bonuses all the time. Budget constraints and all that — he knows Drogo is contending with much of the same. Nevertheless, he appreciate the thought. He knows Drogo is not trying to manipulate him. This is why he calmly says, “Sure. I can do this.”

  
  
  
  
  


So Missy ends up wading through hours and hours of people feeling mightily sorry for her stupid, sorry ass. None of her aunties have forgotten last year, when she had to skip her mother’s death anniversary because the fucking Ghazdaqi government was crumbling under a military coup — and she couldn’t tell anyone the truth about that. She just told them she was on-call and was just called in to work. Only her father and brothers know the type of work she is actually doing. The rest of her extended family members think she is a translator for visiting dignitaries — they think she follows diplomats and their children around museums and translates placards for them.

This is part of why her aunties keep lecturing her on her impending spinsterhood. They like to gesture to her brothers and their families — her chaotic nieces and nephews running around screaming their faces off — and her aunties like to ask her if it just isn’t time to settle down already.

This was a question her mom also had, when her mom was still alive. Even though her mom knew what Missy actually did for a living, her mom often wondered when Missandei was going to get serious with her life and find a man to make babies with.

She used to feel upset over this. She used to feel a sense of self-righteousness because her ego was bruised. She used to hold up her feminism and imply that everyone else was being sexist. But duh, obviously everyone is influenced by this patriarchal culture. Duh.

Now she’s just so fucking tired all the time. She’s been working 90-hour work weeks. She’s been travelling a fair bit. The pressures of her job are immense. She honestly has nothing in common with any of her contemporaries, any of her cousins. She doesn’t care about rising property taxes. She doesn’t give a shit about what the city is going to do with the increasingly visible homeless population and how that influences property values. She doesn’t care about pop culture and what latest crazy thing some dumb celebrity said. She definitely does not think that vaccines cause autism, but she does not give enough of a shit to have a debate with her cousin Meetha over this. She does not care about the latest cosmetics craze — her face just looks like this now.

The one thing that does manage to raise her hackles a little bit is the way everyone and their fucking mother fawn over her brothers. Her brothers are cops, both in narcotics. She loves her brother so much — they are wonderful, they work hard, and they are doing really valuable work — but it is still annoying to watch other people constantly kiss their asses and tell them what heroes they are and how they are both keeping the world a safe place — for the children.

Missy has been dealing with a variation of this, for probably her entire life. One of these days, she’ll finally get over it, maybe.

“I have a refill for you,” her dad says, walking up to her with another glass of red wine.

She is not even finished with her first glass — it is still half-full. So, without lifting her eyes off her brothers’ fan club, she lifts her glass to her mouth and starts chugging.

After she’s done, she wipes her probably-stained mouth with the back of her hand. Then she trades him her current empty glass for a brand new full glass. She says, “Thanks so much, Daddy.”

“A heads up, your aunt Petti has a very nice, very ‘lovely’ boy she wants you to meet.”

  
  
  
  
  


Outside of Karhold, in a small town, Grey walks into a big box hunting store. There is no waiting period policy here. Under a false name, Grey buys a .22 rifle with a telescopic sight. The salesman — a college kid who is just working during summer break — tries to upsell Grey by extolling the virtues of a cold-hammer-forged barrel. It is total BS — the kid doesn’t know what he is talking about. Nonetheless, Grey goes for the upsell because it honestly does not matter to his purposes.

Grey stations himself a little ways outside of Arnolf Karstark’s home, on a hill in the early morning, when Karstark is due to head to his cover job as a low-level sales manager at a farm machinery outfit. Karstark actually lives just a few buildings down from a police station.

Grey kills Karstark outside of his home with a single shot to the head. Karstark’s wife, his young daughter, and a nearby jogger rush to him, screaming and waking up the neighbors. Karstark is dead almost immediately. Grey has already dismantled his gun and has left his post to dispose of his weapon, by the time an ambulance and police cars arrive, eight minutes later.

  
  
  
  
  


Back home in King’s Landing, Grey fights through the fucking hoards at IKEA and contemplates murdering _all of the people_ who are walking against the current, walking in spite of the direction of the arrows on the floor.

He loads shit into his cart blindly: an oven mitt, a potted plant, vases, a shower caddy, bath mats, a picture frame with a skyscraper photo. He also consults with an IKEA home expert and arranges for a sectional sofa, two bed frames, a mattress, and a dining set to be delivered to his apartment in the next week. He goes to the warehouse and pulls out boxes that contain bookcases and side tables and coffee tables and rugs.

He lays down a pretty penny for all of this useless, cheap shit. He methodically fits it all into the back of Gendry’s pickup, as he breaks a sweat and blocks out the sound of children screaming and families chattering.

After all of that effort, he is actually hungry. So he actually goes back into IKEA and buys himself a cheap meal of meatballs and mashed potatoes, and he eats it by himself in the IKEA food court, with his shirt still damp to the touch.

He spends his entire Sunday loading his new shit into his apartment by himself. He opens dozens and dozens of boxes. He ends up commandeering the entire set of recycling bins in the garage of his apartment building even though the trash will not get picked up until Tuesday. He assembles all of his new shit and arranges furniture so it looks like someone normal lives in his apartment.

He meets Gendry that night, slapping Gendry’s car keys back into his hand in greeting. Gendry tosses Grey his own car keys — because they traded for the weekend.

“My tank full, man?” Gendry asks, joking around.

“Oh, was I supposed to do that?” Grey asks. The tank is totally full. And the truck was washed, too.

“You eat yet?” Gendry returns. “Wanna grab a bite?”

“Yeah, sure. I can eat.”

  
  
  
  
  


Their vibe lately has been one of ultra professionalism and a lot of benign silence. He generally only talks about work with her now — because now he’s paranoid that every-fucking-thing he says to Missandei will be faithfully reported back to Daenerys. He has realized that he _really_ can’t be friends with this woman, if he likes his life the way it is, if he likes being employed the way that he is.

She assumes that he does not like her anymore because she did not understand the gravity of what happened to him and told him that he should be grateful for _only_ getting mutilated. She assumes that he hates her now, as he should because _she’s a fucking scumbag._

They have lost that thing where he stares at her with a smirk in his eyes, and she suppresses a groan and stops herself from telling him all about these sexy naked dreams she sometimes has about him to shock him into laughing. They have lost that thing where his voice cracks from disbelief and stress, when she tells him that the best pizza in town is at Toroni’s. They have stopped reminiscing about that one time he slammed his hand into her face and made everyone question his mental state.

They pass the time in massage parlors together, silently on their phones. The Naathi languages lessons with him have died down because he picked it up too fast, as Tal’s and Balaq’s lessons have continued. She is often silent in his ear, as she listens to him pick up and have conversations with sex workers. She largely takes his empathy for them in stride now. It is no longer novel to her, how nice and kind he is to them.

  
  
  
  
  


She puts her fake wedding ring back on before they head to the airport to fly into Eyrie. There, he consolidates their rolling luggage and presses his hand into the small of her back, as he guides the both of them to the rent-a-car counter. Her stomach feels like it’s in knots, as he smiles at her and asks her which car she’d like. Rather than naming a model, she names a color. She says she’d like a shiny black car — which makes both him and the car attendant look at her with such indulgence. The attendant says that he has just the one.

Grey loosely holds her hand, as he leads her to their rental. He holds her hand and strokes her back, as they talk to the front desk woman, at the hotel.

He lets her hand go temporarily, when they finally make it Longbow Hall. He has to let her go so that he can raise up his arms and gallantly say, “Jon! Lysa! Look at your home! I love it! I love your entryway! Is this Bardiglio marble?”

“Why, yes!” Jon says, immediately greeting Grey with a crystal glass of amber liquor. “I can’t believe you picked that out! Good eye! You have wonderful taste!”

As Grey and Jon talk about how the presence of hematite in the calcite is giving Jon’s floor a slight blush — a slight pink tone — Missandei feels a short tap on her shoulder. She turns around.

“Hello, I’m Petyr.”

  
  
  
  
  


Shit gets a bit weird for her as Grey leaves with Jon, leaves her to get the grand tour of the house from Lysa and Lysa’s good friend, Petyr. Grey and Jon are presumably going off to talk about Jon’s strategic vision for Arryn Capital Holdings and what Grey’s ideas are, for investors to tap into, in order to raise growth capital.

As they go from room to room, she can feel Petyr’s eyes following her. And when she turns her head to make eye contact with him, he immediately smiles at her — in a way that wholly makes her uncomfortable.

By the third iteration of this, she smiles back at him, with her heart beating hard in her chest. She asks, “Do I have something in my teeth?”

With this silky ease, he says, “No. You are just very striking, you know. You must get told you are beautiful all the time though.”

She tries to laugh off the compliment — but her body goes a little rigid in the course of it. “Oh! No, not that much. Just my husband — but that is his job!”

  
  
  
  
  


He briefly touches the tip of his nose to her cheek and nuzzles it, as they walk by the hotel reception desk. She can tell that he is _really fucking pissed_ at her, so she working hard to not to go rigid underneath his hands and his touch. He is saying a whole lot of nothing for the time being — there is just his steady hand on her back as he quickly waves at reception, as he continues guiding her to the elevators.

He drops it all — his hand — his smile — his face — the pretense — his patience with her — after the door to their hotel room closes behind them. He sees that their room has been cleaned by room service, so he quickly rushes around checking under the lamps, in the phones, in the other light fixtures, under the bed. And after he doesn’t find any trace of surveillance, he still runs the shower and he pulls her into the bathroom.

Sitting on the closed toilet seat, as the humidity in the room builds and builds, he whispers to her. He is actually also glowering at her. He asks her, “What the fuck happened while y’all were alone together?” He is avoiding naming the people — even though he is sure they are not under surveillance, even though he has obscured this conversation with the running shower.

She feels immediately put on the defensive — and she _knows_ that she didn’t break any protocol at all. She _immediately_ resents his tone of his voice.

He is the lead on this engagement, so he talks to her as if he is her superior — and technically, he is.

From his viewpoint, he was doing his job with Jon — and it was going like fucking clockwork. And all she had to fucking do was coo over drapery and furniture and make fucking small talk about colors or perfume or whatever other womanly shit Lysa is interested in. And that was _it_. So he doesn’t know why he came back to such a fucking tense and odd energy in the room. He doesn’t know why he came back to find his fake wife sitting silently and awkwardly at the dinner table by herself. He doesn’t know why Petyr Baelish kept grinning like the cat who ate the canary. He doesn’t know why Lysa suddenly just acted like his fake wife had caused grave offense by insulting the gaudy silverware or some shit like that.

He quietly hisses, “So please, explain to me what happened in the fucking five minutes I was not watching you.”

“It was more than five minutes,” Missy protests.

“This is the tack you’re going to take with this?” he demands.

“He was creeping —”

“How?” Grey cuts in. “He looked at you? Said stuff to you with your husband in the other room?”

“Well, _yeah,”_ she says dumbly — she is feeling distinctly chastised right now.

 _“So?”_ he asks, as his eyes widen just incrementally. He can’t believe this is her fucking hang-up. He lowers his voice even more. “You literally have creeps asking you how much it costs to stick their dick up your ass _all the time._ You have to listen to that — all the time. You should be _better_ at this, by this point. At this point, you _should be able to_ handle some weird white guy looking at you and talking to you a little _weird.”_

He is angry that she does not seem to understand that every moment they call attention to themselves is a moment that could kill the both of them. He is angry that he has done about 90 percent of the heavy lifting on this operation and did his part pitch-perfectly, but he is only as good as his partner — and she is fucking up her 10 percent. He has encouraged her, believed in her, taught her, worked with her — for _months_ now. And they are _still_ at this fucking _place._

Her cheeks are burning — because she feels so ashamed and so small right now. He is working so hard to make her feel stupid and useless right now — and it is _bullshit._

There is a lot of stuff she can say about this — about how she wasn’t expecting the friend, she wasn’t expecting Lysa to turn the way she did, she didn’t expect that dynamic, she also didn’t expect for Grey to just leave her by herself — and this is seriously the very first time she has done something like this and she honestly has _tried_ to prepare for all potential outcomes, but her inexperience is obviously showing here — and she is _sorry_ for that. Give her a fucking break. Dinner was fine. It was weird at the beginning, but then it smoothed over. It is not Missy fucking fault that Lysa has some fucking weird shit going on with her childhood friend. She fucking tried to roll with it as best as she could.

Instead of offering him some stupid explanations that he will shit all over — she knows that her explanations will sound weak and not make him feel better about her and her abilities — she looks back at his face and she just says, “I’m sorry. I fucked up. I know I’m still not very good at improvising and adapting. I’m _sorry.”_

In response to this, he mutters, “Well, I really hope I hear from Jon soon. I really hope we didn’t just lose months of work.”

  
  
  
  
  


They pretty much give each other space and just ignore each other the entire trip back to King’s Landing. She tests out the waters a little bit by offering him a piece of gum at the airport, after she buys sandwiches for the both of them. He cuts eye contact and tells her that he’s good on the gum.

She thinks that he is being a real asshole to her — over barely a mistake. She thinks that this is a really fucking bullshit part of his personality and working style. She thinks that sometimes people don’t become motivated with extreme negativity. She also thinks that he’s a fucking hypocrite, apparently so concerned with blowing cover, but who is now acting like he can’t even stand the sight of her — as her fat wedding ring weighs down her left hand.

He just thinks they look like a married couple in the middle of a fight. That is fucking normal enough. He just thinks he needs a fucking break from worrying about her life for just a fucking minute. He thinks that whenever she tries to smooth things over and act like things are normal, he just wants to hold it up as yet another example of how she is not taking this shit seriously enough. It is the same fucking problem, over and over again.

She struggles getting her carry-on bag up into the compartment on the plane, because she is wearing four-inch heels and also because she is not incredibly strong because all she fucking does is _cardio_. So he takes the handle of her shit from her — she resists for just the teeniest moment, before she gets massively self-conscious because she is holding up a line of weary passengers trying to get to their seats. She lets him have her luggage.

And he throws it up into the overhead bin for her.

 _“Thanks,_ babe,” she hisses, flopping into her window seat.

“Don’t mention it,” he says mutinously, before he clips in, in the aisle seat next to her.

The flight is four hours.

It is going to be great.

  
  
  
  
  


Grey is being a real fucking bitch to her — like she thought Drogo was bad, but it turns out Drogo was just a practice run for this new kind of judgemental hypercontrol and criticism — so she tells herself she needs to move the fuck on and fix her fucking brain so that it’s not so attracted to hot violent guys with deep-seated trauma-related issues because it’s like, _is she trying to have sex with her fucking father,_ or what?

She texts the phone number that her auntie emailed to her. She is like: _Sup?_

And she acts like she’s a person that writes “Sup?” to strange men all the time.

Dany is too busy to meet up in person, so Missy has to text to tell Dany that she does not know what she is supposed to wear on her date. It’s a coy announcement.

It elicits about the kind of response that Missy expects.

Dany throws so much enthusiasm at Missy, through exclamation points and emojis. Wherever Dany is right now, she is making the time to be engaged and respond with the kind of girliness that was more a fixture of their friendship back in college. Dany is demanding to know all of the details — when the date is happening, where it is taking place, who is setting it up, what is his name, has Missy social-media stalked him yet, and is he cute?

Missy tells Dany that he is a software engineer. They are being introduced by her aunt. She has looked a little bit at his profile on social media. He looks like he likes to travel, and he likes to eat.

Missy takes a screencap of his picture from Instagram and then sends it to Dany.

Dany enthusiastically writes back: _He’s so cuuute!!!_

  
  
  
  
  


When he picks up his folks at the airport, he can smell home on them. They are carrying some of the scent of the Summer Isles in their clothes — his dad’s cologne is just barely masking the smell of anise, curry powder, and also fry grease. It is very nice.

He has to get out of the car completely and hold out his arms so that his parents can both grab onto him. He feels himself get lifted a little bit — by his dad because his dad is still physically strong. He feels his mom burying her face in his chest — and he has to say, “Mom, come on. Don’t cry. I am fine. I am clearly totally fine.”

  
  
  
  


 


	17. Missy and Grey go on dates

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy dates a dude that completely bores her as the future love of her life insists on continuing to ignore her. Grey goes to great lengths to prove to his parents that he is totally normal — and treats it as if they just met him yesterday. Missy's dad is awesome. Grey's mom and dad are awesome, too, but they are also PISSED at him and scared for him. Aw. Missy buys Grey coffee and a bagel, because she is not good at remembering that he has repeatedly rejected her interest in him. SHE WILL DRINK A BEVERAGE AND BREAK BREAD WITH HIM GODDAMMIT. Most importantly, it seems like our OTP might be getting back together.

  
  


His home looks like a page out of the IKEA catalog, and it is annoying because he liked it best when his home comprised two lawn chairs, a mattress on the floor, a ceramic plate, and one silverware set. He liked it when his home basically conveyed that people needed to get the fuck out of his space and not linger too long.

When his dad sees his apartment, his dad says, “Whoa.”

When his mom sees his apartment, she intertwines her fingers together in front of her long jacket, and scrutinizes it silently. He told her that it is like, currently pretty hot and humid in King’s Landing because it’s summer. But she still bought a thick winter coat anyway, because she keeps misguidedly thinking that anywhere north of the Summer Isles is gonna be cold as shit.

His mom says, “Your furniture looks new. Did you just buy it?”

“A few months ago.”

“Okay,” she says. Her face is blank as she pops buttons out of holes, as she pulls off her heavy outer layer. She does not understand exactly when her son became a compulsive liar or what she did to allow him to become this way.

His mom’s silence is making Grey internally go: _Fuck, fuck, fuck!_

“Well, let me show you guys where you’re gonna be sleeping,” He says, quickly trying to smooth things over.   

  
  
  
  


Missy has had to cancel her first date with software engineer Paul two times already — each time citing an unexpected work situation that came up. The first time she cancels, it was because Drogo needed the ramped-up delivery of a report because the higher-ups are being unreasonable. Grey’s parents had just gotten into town, so instead of allowing him to cancel his dinner plans with his folks, Missy went ahead and volunteered to stay up all night writing up the report for the both of them. Grey never thanked her specifically for cancelling on her date — because instead of telling him she was cancelling a date, she literally told him, “I am not doing anything anyway! I would just be sitting at home bored anyway! You’re actually doing _me_ the favor!”

She’s been working overtime, trying to get them good again. She really likes how each one of her desperate and transparent efforts looks real pathetic. She really liked the way Drogo and Grey gave her identical looks of patience, and said, “Sure — okay — thank you,” in unison.  

The second time she canceled on software guy Paul was because Yiantha had another fight with her shitty boyfriend and wanted to meet with Missandei because Yiantha was scared of what he might do to her in anger. Yiantha now has trust in Missy and believes that Missandei can protect her. This is a belief Missy is continuing to cultivate and reinforce.

When she finally meets with software Paul for dinner, she is wearing a tight, short, hot pink skirt and a modest white blouse — because she spilled coffee on her pants accidentally and the spill happened in the crotch area. She is wearing one of her hooker skirts with one of her regular tops. It’s not really an aesthetic she goes for in her day-to-day, but she doesn’t think this guy can put up with _another_ cancellation from her — this time because of wardrobe issues.

When he sees her walk up, he recognizes her from her picture. And he starts beaming. It looks like he thinks he won the jackpot.

He says to her, “Looks like third time’s the charm!”   

  
  
  
  


Grey basically behaves like a teen boy again — sort of. He was actually a really obedient and non-rebellious teenager.

Now though —

He basically heads home from work at around 4 p.m. to have really early dinner with his parents and act like he is completely normal and not a fucking lunatic working an insane job. He makes yum noises and rubs his belly as he chokes down the food his mom cooks for him, as he listens to her complain about _everything_ , from his stove to his lights, to the water pressure in his faucets and shower. They chat in the living room afterward with coffee and tea. Sometimes they do some reading. Sometimes they turn on the TV, but his parents hate TV, so mostly, it’s just quiet talking or silence. And then they go to bed at around eight or nine.

He installed a lock on his door. He has been locking the door to his bedroom after his parents go to bed. He has been climbing out of his window, climbing down the fire escape. He has been jumping down the last story every night, hitting the asphalt hard in the alley because he doesn’t want the rattle of metal to clue his parents onto his absence.

And then he goes back to work, from ten o’clock to maybe four or five in the morning, at which point, he has to climb all the fuck up the fire escape, back into his bedroom. He usually gets to sleep in until past nine, but since his parents are around and would think it’s fucking weird for him to get more than twelve hours of sleep at night, he has to stay awake and grab coffee and have breakfast with them each day. They read the news. They talk about it. They sometimes take a walk as he listens to his mom complain about the amount of trash that is on the ground. By the time he leaves for work again at seven-thirty — he has not fucking slept _at all_.

“How long do you think you can keep this up?” Sam asks him, raising his brows.

“Um.” Grey is pretending to think about it. “Indefinitely? At least two months.”

“Grey,” Sam says, in exasperation now. “Just tell your parents the truth.”

“Which part?”

“How about _all of it?”_

“The security clearance though.”

Sam gives him a look. “I obviously meant everything that doesn’t require clearance.”

  
  
  
  


So he assures himself of his own fucking sanity for the millionth time in life, and he starts just taking micro naps in the course of a day. He spends ten minutes scarfing down calories during lunch, and then he spends the rest of the time sleeping in his car. He wakes up drowsy and tired and feeling like he wants to shoot himself in the fucking head because he’s so goddamn stupid.

His colleagues start asking him where he is hiding these days — because he’s spending very little time socializing and hanging out with them in the cafeteria. Daario jokingly asks him if he is leading yet _another_ secret life that they and his parents don’t know about. To counter this, Grey invites Daario over to dinner on the weekend. He reminds Daario that Daario is his fake boyfriend, so it would be great if Daario can do him a fucking solid and grab a free meal with the two cranky old people who made him from their loins.

Daario is actually not free. Daario also reminds Grey that Daario is not really at Grey’s beck and call — he’s not Grey’s fuckboy just because Grey is scared of his folks.

  
  
  
  


So Grey goes down the line of presentable people to ask to prove his sanity to his parents. He asks Tal to come over. Tal has plans with his girlfriend, who has been pissed at him for fucking months over Tal’s absence from her life because of his shitty work schedule, so Tal has to say no to Grey. Grey asks Alayaya to do him a solid — and she tells him it will cost him. He thinks that she means she will accept payment in sex, and he’s so delirious and so sleep-deprived that he is like, fucking _fine_ about it.

But actually, she holds out her hand and expectantly waits for money to be put into it.

In confusion, he takes out his wallet and puts down a few bills — which she crumples lightly in her hand before she folds them and puts them in her bra. She tells him, “Thanks, Nudho! This will help me fix my busted AC unit!”

And as she walks away, he is saying, “Did you just rob me?”

Over her shoulder, she responds with, “Examine _your life._  Think about what _you are doing_ right now.”

Missandei watches as Grey completely overlooks her on purpose and does not ask her to help him prove to his parents that he has friends and lives a normal life. She is close to feeling as blank about it as she ever has — when it comes to him. She is starting to get it. She is starting to understand the place that he would like for her to occupy in his life — which is at a distance.

  
  
  
  


When she walks barefoot down the stairs, with her sensible black shoes dangling from her fingertips, her dad is sitting in the den, in his recliner, watching sports highlights.

She bends over to give him a kiss goodnight on the cheek. She thinks that it must be a relief for him, to be saying goodbye to her as she goes on a date — to not be saying goodbye to her as she leaves the house armed and on the way to work a really dangerous job.

“That’s what you’re wearing?” he asks, as the TV screen glows blue against his face. It is dark and the lights are all off.

She looks down at her navy skirt and her blouse, buttoned up to her neck. She is wearing pearl earrings. She actually thinks she looks nice — like an adult woman who takes care of herself. For once. She actually thinks it’s really nice to be wearing her own clothes, to not be dressed as a hooker or dressed as some rich guy’s trophy wife, for once.

“What’s wrong with what I am wearing?” she asks, standing up straight and smoothing down imaginary wrinkles from the front of her skirt.

“Baby, you look beautiful,” her dad assures her — though his eyes are trained back on the TV screen. “But it’s not very sexy, is it? You’re all covered up. How will he know you like him?”

Her jaw drops.

And then she good-naturedly swats him in the arm. _“Dad!_ I can’t believe you just said that to me!”

He is chuckling, as his hand goes to the remote. “I’m a liberal parent now,” he says, kind of sarcastically. “Your mom was holding me back, all those years.”

This results in a pregnant pause — one that is not altogether awkward or tense — but one that is still plaintive and a little bit sad. They are both thinking about the same things, maybe. They are probably thinking of the times a teenage Missandei had screaming fights with her mom over the length of her skirt or the times teenage Missandei had a male classmate call the house for homework help and her dad blew a gasket over that while their mom was tasked with talking to their daughter about acceptable behavior.

She pats him on the shoulder.

He says, “On our first date, your mom wore this red dress — and that was how I knew she was feeling a certain way about me. Because the dress had a tie —” He touches his stomach. “Right here.”

She is trying not to get all teary about this — so she is smiling at him like a psycho.

She says, “Dad, what does that even mean?”

  
  
  
  


His folks hate eating out because the procedure and rituals of Western dining bother them — it is foreign, and it is too intrusive to them.

Nevertheless, he takes his parents out to dinner on Saturday, because it doesn’t sit well with him, that his mom is constantly cooking for him and cleaning his bedroom and the rest of the apartment while he is at work. He knows it’s how she shows her love. But he has lived apart from them for a long time now. He has been independent since he was still a kid. It is hard for him to let his mom do things for him — even though he knows that it alleviates her worries about him.

He has to put eye drops into his eyes so they are less red, before they leave the house. He has had to blow off all of his parents protestations. They have told him that if he’s too tired from work to go out — then he should stay in and rest.

He has told them that they are fucking nuts. He is great! He is excited that they are here! They are going to have a great meal!

His heart is beating hard in his throat as they arrive at the restaurant. It’s because he is so tired and he might be slowly dying.

He blinks a few times to clear his head, as he hears his mom's surprised exclaim. She says, “Drogo! We didn’t expect you!”

“Surprise,” Grey says ruefully.

“Hi, ma’am — and sir,” Drogo says, immediately getting out of his seat at the table to grab onto their hands. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it! How are you guys liking King’s Landing?”

“I really hate it here,” Grey’s dad says bluntly, before breaking out into a short laugh.

“Yeah, me too,” Drogo says, gesturing for them all to sit down.

  
  
  
  


She doesn’t really feel that much attraction to software Paul — he is objectively handsome and fit — but he smiles too much and he is happy about too much. He also has a white guy’s name — which isn’t really his fault — that’s on his parents. But she has speculated that his white name has imbued him with a white personality. She finds his preoccupations a little entitled. She asked him what it’s like to be a Black software engineer. He told her it is fine — great! It's great to mentor others! It's great to be a role model! Representation is great!

And she was like, oh shit, for real? What the fuck?

But it’s their third date, so she still follows him to his apartment and kisses him there, after the door is shut behind them. She kisses him because she hasn’t had any sex in _years_ and she would like to remember what sex feels like and what it is all about. She also kisses him because her dad’s undying love for her mother is just stuck in her mind — and it is messing her up a little bit.

She sits on his couch as he scrambles to clear away a . . . hookah, a bong, and some charcoal ash on a tech magazine. It makes her realize that he has been presenting. He has been keeping parts of himself hidden to her also. It also makes her realize that he apparently did not expect for this date to go in this direction either.

He nervously offers her some water.

Instead of answering him, she grabs the lapels of his blazer and she lays a kiss on him instead. She feels numb inside as he kisses her sloppily and wet, with his lips puckering and moving up and down against her relatively stationary ones. She can taste garlic from his dinner and the beer that he drank. She can hear and feel his heavy breathing that is verging on panting. She is wondering if his heart is healthy, if he does cardio in his workout.

She admonishes herself for her silly superficiality, as she unbuttons the top few buttons of her blouse. She slowly exposes her bra and her breasts, as she sits back and sinks herself deep into his couch.

He looks stunned.

And then he reaches out squeezes her boob really hard — she tries not to flinch over it.

He tells her, “You are so _hot._ You are so sexy. _”_

And she is like, “Thanks,” about it.

  
  
  
  


They actually have a really nice evening together. He is absolute garbage — he is so tired that he can’t really focus that well and he can’t really tell good stories. He just subsides and sits there, as Drogo effortlessly charms the shit out of his parents with stories about himself and his upbringing — speculations about how coming from poverty and being raised by a single mother made him who he currently is. He plays to his audience a little bit, and he tells them about the value of his education and what a fluke that was — just him making it. He talks about the challenges and the pressures of holding it all together.

Drogo claps Grey on the back and leaves his hand there. He tells Grey’s parents, “He did my job better than I ever can. You don’t even know how smart and dedicated this guy is — how hard he works —”

“We do know,” his mom interjects. She vaguely gestures to Grey’s face. “We know. Because look at him.”

“Do you want to order coffee?” his dad offers — staring at him a little harder than necessary.

“Nah, I’m good,” Grey mutters.

He feels Drogo squeezing his shoulder. “Just get the coffee, bud. It will make us all feel better.”

  
  
  
  


When he puts his wet mouth on her chest, she actually flinches and recoils — at the way it feels. Her mind immediately shoots to her work — to the johns. She actually absently tells herself that this act would usually cost more than a hundred. But she is giving it away for free right now. Does it even make financial sense to give this away for free when she could be earning money for her troubles?

As Paul starts fumbling around for the clasp of her bra — and here, she is not helping him a lot — she actually thinks that she would rather be working right now — instead of doing _this_. Sex is not feeling like how she expected it to feel. The threat of sex is leaving her feeling rather empty inside. She is wondering if this is a side effect of her vocation — or if it’s the guy.   

And it’s when he’s running his hand up her bare leg, and in between them, heading strikingly fast toward her underwear — that she grabs his wrist.

And with her other hand, she wrenches his face off of her boobs.

He physically fights her on both counts — just a tiny bit. She tries not to hold it against him, because he is horny and he is probably pretty excited over the prospect of getting laid. But for the short moment that he resists her stoppage, she pretty much wants to beat his face in, by cramming her fist into it repeatedly. Her hand actually automatically tucked itself underneath his couch cushions — before she freezed, and it hit her hard. She just automatically looked for her gun. This is the training blaring out.

He looks dumbfounded.

She softly knocks him back — with a short shove. She says, “No. I change my mind.”

He says, “No?”

“No,” she repeats, more firmly.

“Are you _sure?”_

“Yeah, super sure,” she says.

“How come?” he asks, frowning now. His lips are still shiny. “I thought we were having a good time.”

  
  
  
  


He also gives Drogo a hug because his parents did. His back cracks in the process, and he tiredly pats Drogo in between his broad shoulder blades. Grey is thinking that he should probably give Drogo a fucking break from here on out. That assault incident was months ago. And Drogo was just trying to protect Missandei.

After looping over it, again and again, with Sam, Grey now understands that he probably reacted the way he did — cut Drogo out of his life — because he was so upset when faced with the possibility that the one person he was sure was in his corner could waver in loyalty to him. He understands he was really hurt by what Drogo did, and Grey doled out the only kind of effective punishment he knew, to stop himself from being hurt again. It is all now pretty straightforward to him because he’s such a fucking basic bitch.  

“Night, man,” Drogo says, giving him one last squeeze. “This was fun. Thanks for the invite.”

“Yeah, man. Anytime you’re free.”

“Do you want to do lunch on Monday?”

“What the fuck?” Grey says, pulling away a little bit and squinting at Drogo.

Drogo shrugs. “I am free Monday for lunch. Are you? Do you want to eat together?”

“Wow,” Grey mutters, aware that his parents are waiting for him by the car. And that they probably now think that Drogo is his boyfriend because this goodbye is taking _forever_. “Yeah, sure,” Grey says absently. “I am free. But can I like, lie down on your couch in your office as we lunch?”

“Grey,” Drogo starts, sighing already. But then, thinking better of it, Drogo opts to say, “Yeah, sure. We’ll order in or I’ll bring in food.”

 

  
  


Without Drogo’s presence, the drive home is actually excruciatingly long and kind of tense. It starts when his dad insists on driving his car back to his apartment, because — according to his dad — it’s not necessary for them all to fucking die together because Grey fell asleep at the wheel.

His parents are frustrated with him. They are also insulted — that he doesn’t realize that though there are some really significant gaps in their knowledge, they still know him enough. Because of course they do. He is their son. They raised him. They watched him grow up. They know the mechanism of some of his behaviors. A lot of his behavior is repetitive and obsessive. They have been seeing that again. When he was younger and made a minor mistake on an exam or in an oral presentation to his class — he’d come home and beat himself up about it for a really long time. He would practice for hours and hours after the fact, even though it didn’t matter anymore. They used to hold up his work ethic as aspirational and ideal.

That was probably a mistake. They are seeing this now.

They are tired of arguing with him about his lies. He won’t admit his lies to them. But it is obvious he is lying to them — about every aspect of himself. It is obvious that he thinks it is necessary — and they don’t know his reasons, so they have to make up sinister reasons for him. It is obvious he is suffering, but there is not much they can do about this besides witness it. That is why they are here. They tried to prepare themselves for this before leaving home. They are finding it to be far more difficult to see than they anticipated. They have been hurting themselves, by talking among themselves, telling each other that they want to at least see him and be with him and make memories with him, one last time before something terrible happens to him and he is just _gone_ to them.

“Do you want to put on some tea when we get home?” he asks them softly.

“I actually want you to fucking say something honest to me for the first time in years,” his dad suddenly says. “How about that?”

  
  
  
  


Her dad is still awake and trying to play it super cool when she gets home from her date. Her dad takes in her appearance and jokingly tells her that he didn’t expect her to come home at all tonight.

She scrunches up her nose as she leans against the wall to pull off her shoes. She says, “Daddy, you are creeping me out with how supportive you are being. Knock it off.”

“Did you have a nice time?”

“It was okay.”

“Just okay?”

She sighs. “The chemistry just wasn’t there. I didn’t show up in — as you put it — a red dress with a tie right here.” She points to her own stomach.

Then she leaves her shoes in the foyer and heads into the kitchen, leaving him to follow. She is opening the fridge door to look for leftovers. She is planning on doing a little bit of comfort eating.

With her head still in the fridge, as her hands dig around, she says, “Plus, my schedule is whack. It took forever for us just to sync up there. I don’t think I can date anyone right now. Like, it’s logistically impossible.”  

She grabs a jar of homemade pickles, of vegetables from her dad’s garden in the back. She freezes with a thought.

Then she says, “Dad, have _you_ thought about dating again? I mean, you have the time. You are a catch. You need to hang out with someone besides me. I bet there is Tinder for old people — I bet there’s an app for this —”

She has uncapped the jar and is digging her dirty hand into it the glass as she spins around to look at her pops, with the door to the fridge still opened.

“Missy, _no.”_

  
  
  
  


She has coffee in her cupholder ready for him when she rolls up to his apartment for the first time ever. She doesn’t know how he drinks his coffee — but judging from the look of him and his general schtick, she assumes that he likes his coffee hot and black. Dark and bitter like his soul.

So she got him a soy mocha.

He is waiting for her at the curb when she arrives. He evidently does not want her to actually know where he lives with more specificity. He obviously does not want her to run into his parents. It’s cool. It’s not her first time meeting him. She is now pretty familiar with his work.

She rolls down the window to peer at him. She says, “Hey, baby. How much does your cute tushy cost for an hour?”

He scrunches his face super adorably and just snappishly says, “Ugh, gross,” before he crosses over the front of her car, tosses his bag into the backseat of her car, and then flounces into the passenger seat.

She presents him his coffee. She says, “For you!”

He smells it before he sips it. And after he does, he says, “Ugh, it’s sweet.”

Nailed it.  

“There’s also a bagel for you — in that bag at your feet. It’s an everything bagel!” She got him an everything bagel because she is pretty sure he likes plain bagels. Or whole wheat bagels.

“Thanks, man.”

“Don’t forget the cheese. You have to eat it with the schmear. How was your weekend?”

“Fucking awesome,” he says sarcastically, drinking from his cup as she puts the car into drive. She is looking up at his building, wondering which apartment is his, wondering which window is his.

He is digging into the food bag with his other hand, faithfully plucking up the bagel she promised him.

“Still having fun with your folks?”

“Yeah, just having a non-stop blast with those fuckers,” he mutters. “Thanks for picking me up.”

He texted her on Sunday night and bluntly asked her to cart his useless ass to work, because his psycho parents won’t let him rent them a car. His psycho parents would rather just camp out in his apartment for hours every day, waiting for him to come home from work like that’s fucking normal. He told her that the only way this fucking psycho parents will use a vehicle and _go somewhere with it_ is if he leaves his vehicle and tells them that it’s no big deal. He had to lie and tell them he gets picked up for work by his partner all the time. That is completely a normal thing that fucking happens all the time.

“Grey,” she says, steadily, looking at him out of the corner of her eye.

“What?” he says warily.

“You _owe me_ now,” she says triumphantly, as this grin spreads across her face. “You are _indebted_ to me now.”

He says, “Oh my God.”

  
  
  
  
  



	18. Grey gets beat up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey, that idiot, finally learns that going without sleep is the dumbest idea ever. The future love of his life would like to get laid, but he's too dumb to do much to help her out there. He just carries on working and being professional with her, ignorant and not appreciating enough, how she is repeatedly saving his ass, over and over. Then shit goes down, and Grey's dumb ass FINALLY figures out he cannot keep carrying on like this. HUZZAH!

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


On Monday, during lunch, Drogo wastes no time at all. He just wants to be  _ square _ with Grey again, and he has spent the last half of a year just feeling like shit over what has become of them. 

Drogo is holding a steak sandwich in his hands, as he says, “I’m real sorry about reporting you up and putting a target on your back with internal affairs, man. I really didn’t want to. It fucking  _ sucked  _ to.”

Grey is bad with apologies — specifically at accepting them graciously. He doesn’t want to talk about this anymore at all. He just wants for them to be over it, too. So he says, “Yeah, I get it, man. We good.”

And then he tiredly bites into his own sandwich.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She starts spending a little extra quality time with herself in the shower, to deal with the sexual frustration she is feeling. She was raised by stodgy, uptight immigrants who were deathly scared she was going to get teenage-pregnant and ruin her entire future, so she has some hang ups when it comes to sex. Like, she keeps her vibrator in a locked safe in her closet — where it goes utterly unused for months at a time — because she is so scared of her dad stumbling upon it while he putters around the house, while he is folding her clothes and hanging things up in her closet.  

She feels safer masturbating in the shower. There is no way her dad will interrupt her there. The sound of water running is a nice backdrop and veil of disguise for what she is doing. Plus, it is self-cleaning. 

She pays a subscription fee to an app called OurTime. It is a senior dating app, and even though her dad blared a big fat no thanks to her on this front, she doesn’t think there is any harm in looking for him. Her mom has been gone for a few years now. Her dad is really healthy. He could have like,  _ decades _ of life left. It seems like a long time to spend it without companionship.  

She starts swiping left and right on mature women. She mostly does this based solely on her own tastes, and not her dad’s. Because, well, her dad’s taste is her mom. And her mom is dead. 

Missy vetos most of the white women — and there are  _ a lot _ of white women on the app. She is sure they are all very nice, but she does _ not _ want a white stepmom, to be frank about it. 

She saves the profiles of bohemian-looking, artsy-looking women. She also saves the profiles of active women — the ones who like to hike and travel. She bypasses women who express that they like to cook. Her dad is a really great cook. He don’t need competition in the kitchen.

Missy discovers that, wow, she really has a specific vision for her future stepmom.

  
  
  
  
  
  


To deal with the sexual frustration, with the lack of romance in her life, Missy starts to increase the intensity of her workouts — to burn off some energy and to tire herself out enough that she will accept that the johns and their compliments on her body are really the closest things she will get to being properly wined and dined. 

She is also a little disturbed by how solid software Paul felt against her hands, when she shoved him back. She really needs to fucking get to the point where she feels secure beating the shit out of any given motherfucker that wants to assault her — with just her fists. She used to do martial arts, but she had let that fall the wayside because of years at a desk job.

So she incorporates weights into her workouts. She makes herself sweat and pant hard until the water soaks into her clothes and the salt stings her eyes. She ends each workout with a real hard sprint, until her lungs feel like they are about to burst apart like balloons, until she is gasping like she has just resurfaced.

“Hey, wipe your face and take a break from your emotional breakdown for a sec.”

Both of her hands are still grasping onto the handles of the treadmill as it slows down, as she pivots around and locks eyes with him.

Grey is grinning — apparently pleased that she isn’t just jogging at a leisurely pace anymore, that fucking asshole. “Selmy was asking for an update on Operation Grizzly Bear. I scheduled something for one o’clock.” He checks his watch. “It’s almost one. I put it on your cal. But you haven’t been checking?”

“You — you must’ve put it — in the last hour?” she says, gasping.

He nods. He says, “Yep,” as he starts backing out of the gym. “See you in a bit.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


For about two weeks, Missandei actually proves to be pretty helpful, in helping him manage the two sides of his life. She starts carting his ass to and from work each day — which actually involves an inorganic break for her at about four o’clock, just to take him home. 

He starts to explain to her that he knows this situation is so fucking stupid and embarrassing, but she waves him off. She tells him she doesn’t need to hear it. She gets it. Parents.

She always shows up in the morning with coffee and a hunk of carbs even though he has already eaten breakfast with his parents. She drives them onto campus with morning radio turned down low, with very little conversation. All he has to do is look out of the window, as the buildings and trees whip by them silently. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


She rolls her eyes at him when he slides into their work car, at their meeting place in South King’s landing. She teasingly tells him that he’s a little bit late — which is a lie, so it makes him refute her passionately. He tells her to shut up — fix her fucking watch. 

And she laughs over how brutally he overreacts sometimes.

He always checks his gun before holstering it against his ribs, before he lets her exit the car. He sincerely hopes she knows that no matter how irritated he gets with her sometimes, that he will always have her back out there. 

She has started bullying him into taking short naps in massage parlors. She sits vigilant, with a gun in her lap, as he reluctantly acquiesced and lies down on a really dirty bed and shuts his eyes. He promises her it will just be a short power nap — then he will be fresh as fuck again.

Sometimes, the sky is violet and red outside, when he opens his eyes again. Sometimes, he looks at her like she has betrayed him, and he tells her that she fucked up and she was supposed to wake him up — does she want to  _ die _ or what?

She smiles at him darkly. She asks him if he knows that he snores a little bit — it’s very soft. She tells him, “It’s really cute.”

He generally ignores the growing confidence this woman has in herself and her skillset — and he lets her drive his ass back home so that he can get there faster. He lets her watch him climb on a dumpster, balance on it, and then jump for the fire escape. She watches him from her car the first time he does this show for her. She says, “Wow, Grey. This is  _ a lot _ .”

  
  
  
  
  
  


During week three, he rewards her for all of her help. He shows up in her car in the morning with a small thermos and a bundle wrapped up in wax paper. He hands it to her without explanation. She has to prod him for answers. She has to say, “What is this?”

He immediately grumbles — he rolls his eyes and he mutters, “My mom made you a snack. And coffee.”

“Aw, your mom remembers who I am!” she asks, immediately brightening.

“Oh my God, calm down,” Grey says, picking up the mocha she faithfully buys for him every morning, from the cupholder between them. He takes a sip even though he already has done a round of coffee with his parents. He gets so jacked up on caffeine because of these people. “She doesn’t know it’s you. She just knows I’m getting picked up and dropped off by  _ someone _ every day.”

Before driving off to work, Missy pulls apart the paper of the bundle to peek inside.

“It’s a curried lentil pastry,” Grey explains. “It’s like, really healthy for you.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


After a month of this insanity, it finally catches up to Grey. He finally sees the error of his terrible decision-making. He finally understands what Sam has been repeatedly telling him — and what Drogo has prophetically warned him of. The sleep deprivation is taking its toll. It degrades his cognitive abilities — makes him dumber — and it also slows down his reflexes and dulls them.

He is the midst of trying to talk to a girl through charm and maybe also money. He is exposed and out in the open — save for the dark wall of an alley behind him. He opens up conversation by telling her that a buckle on her shoe has come loose — and he watches as she stoops down to fix it. He grins and looks at her with sexual tension, as she rises again. He asks her for her name, asks her if she is new here.

He honestly does not get that far, before Missandei spots a dark figure advancing on them really quickly — and Missy is like,  _ oh shit _ .

She kicks open the passenger door of their car open real fast, slams it shut, starts pulling her gun from its holster, and then lightly starts trying to catch up to them as quietly and as non-threateningly as possible.

By the time she gets there, Grey is already in the middle of this quarrel that is just catching him the fuck off guard. He is exhausted — and slow — so he has to fight to understand what is even happening. He was just going through the motions of work and expecting all of the predictable things to happen. He has having a hard time getting a grasp on this newness. He thinks this is a lovers quarrel that he was caught in.

Missandei understands though. The man is related to the woman somehow — not a lover, but maybe a brother. He is high — his words are thick and slurry — and hard to understand as he screams. He screams in anguish that she is a fucking whore — over and over and over again.

“Sir!” Missandei says, keeping her gun low. “Sir, please back away from them!”

He is screaming, “You’re a fucking whore! You fucking  _ whore! Carla!  _ I can’t believe this! I can’t fucking believe this! _ ” _

Carla is wailing — just these anguished yells — and to Grey, it looks like she is sobbing and crying and breaking down — and so he relaxes his shoulders and evens out his breathing.

And then Carla just  _ unleashes.  _ She suddenly leaps forward with her fist clenched, and she is aiming it right at her brother’s face as she screams savagely and incoherently.    

She gets one good hit in. He stumbles back in surprise.

And then her brother starts holding up his arms to block the hits. He also starts to yell incoherently — and he sounds upset and sad, more than angry.

Missandei holsters her gun again — because the nature of what is going on has changed. She is switching over to verbal de-escalation now. She has her arms out, and she is trying to be heard over them. She is shouting, “Carla, it’s okay! Carla — you are okay! Carla, take a breath and step away. We won’t let him near you if you don’t want him near you.”

She pauses, for just a second.

Missandei’s heart is pounding.

And then Grey reaches his arms out — presumably to subdue Carla.

The movement catches Carla’s eyes — she sees that she has been betrayed and lied to by Missandei — and she just  _ loses it  _ again.

She screams,  _ “NO!”  _ as she throws her head back hard and throws her elbow back, knocking Grey into the wall — they can hear his feet scraping against gravel. And then Missandei sees him reach up to touch his mouth, as blood drips into his hand.

Well,  _ fuck. _

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey’s blunder sets them back a fair bit. Grey’s presence becomes a trigger for Carla, so Missy has to send him away — just a few yards back so that he’s not within grabbing distance anymore. Carla starts hatefully calling him a motherfucking piece of shit pig as she cries — and Missandei tries to get her body in between the two of them, blocking him from Carla’s eyes. Carla’s brother has agreed to sit on the curb for a while, after Missy promised that no one will get arrested tonight as long as they all stay calm. 

To Carla, Missandei keeps saying, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that happened. He didn’t mean it like that. He’s a good guy. But I know that was really scary for you. I know that how that must’ve felt. I’m really sorry he scared you. That wasn’t right or nice. I know.”

  
  
  
  
  


After all that is said and done — after Missandei gives Carla and Rick, the brother, her business card and is somewhat assured that they won’t start fighting each other again — well, when she intersects with Grey again, he is mired in some real deep self-loathing. He is leaning against their car, watching her do her job silently. He is mentally beating himself down, for fucking up so royally. 

He is telling himself that he is most definitely mentally compromised — he’s fucking losing his mind — he is fucking insane now — he can’t do his job anymore — as she quietly walks up to him.

She looks at his face. She says, “How are you feeling?” She gestures to the cut on his lip, that he is pressing a fat piece of gauze over, from the first aid kit in their trunk.

“I need to go to the hospital,” he announces to her.

Her brows knit together. She says, “What? Why?”

He wearily turns around. He reaches his hand around his neck and he points to a dark spot on his shoulder — blood.  

He says, “There was a nail or something sharp, on the wall.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They have to go to the hospital because it is protocol to. He needs to be checked out by a doctor and get a tetanus shot. Even though they show their identifications, there are like . . . people dying in the emergency room that need to be prioritized ahead of them — so they wait.

In the midst of the waiting, she calls in the incident. She alerts the team of what happened and lets them know that Grey needs to be checked out and cleared by a doctor before he returns to work.

Sitting next to him, in the waiting room — as these waves of  _ anger _ roll off of him — she gently touches his back — his spine. He is hunched forward because he doesn’t want to get blood all over the chairs like the piece of shit that he is. She has already pushed up his shirt and bandaged him up before they headed to the hospital so there’s not much seeping out anymore — but he is self-punishing. 

She says, “Does it hurt a lot?”

He mutters, “I am fine.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


And hour passes in the waiting room before he re-realizes what he already knows — he is fucked. He is a moron. He is the one who is constantly just  _ wrong _ here. He realizes what time it is. His parents are getting up soon. He will not make it back in time to pretend he was at home the whole time. He also cannot show up without a cut face just telegraphing all of the fucking  _ lying _ he’s been doing to them. It is over. It is completely over. He is fucked.

To her, he says, “I need to go call my folks and tell them where I am and that I’m okay,” as he gingerly stands up. “I’ll be right back.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


When she drops him off, it is almost seven in the morning. The sun is up. She catches him looking up the fire escape — and, guessing what he must be thinking, she reaches out and grabs onto his hand. She gives it a hard squeeze — and he lets her. She asks, “Do you want me to come up with you?”

He kind of laughs — humorlessly. He says, “What for?”

“I don’t know. Moral support?”

“Nah, it’s all good,” he says quietly, touching the door handle with his other hand. “I ain’t scared of what they will do to me. Just of losing esteem in their eyes and stuff.”

She smiles at that — at his weak attempt to lighten the mood. 

Before letting go of her, he briefly squeezes her hand back. He says, “Thank you. You saved my ass today. And I’ve been terrible to you.”

“I mean, yeah, you have,” she says lightly. “But that’s no reason to let you get your ass beat by a sex worker, though. I ain’t petty.”

This makes him laugh — for real.  

She catches him smiling at her.

Her heart pretty much stops beating at that. So that’s just great.

And in the course of letting go of her hand, he lets their palms and fingers run briefly against each other. 

He tells her, “I’ll be in by noon today. See you later.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


When he opens the door to his apartment, he more or less expects for his mom to immediately start yelling at him. He actually expects the same from his dad.

But actually, what happens is that they are just silent and sitting on his IKEA sofa — as they slowly take in his face and he lets them. And then his mom starts to quietly drop fat tears down her face. And actually, his dad does the same. 

He feels himself get emotional about this, too. He quietly says, “Hey, we should talk. I  _ will _ talk. But I am just like — I haven’t slept in weeks. Do you mind — can I just go lie down for a little bit?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei pulls a Grey and just doesn’t go back to sleep. Unlike Grey though, she plans on going home early today and just crashing into her bed — after she gives her dad a great big hug and thanks him for being so fucking wonderful all the time. 

Right now, though, she has to walk nearly fifteen minutes to the otherside of the campus, on the east side. She has bypass walls and walls of green glass and an abstract statue that look like Jenga blocks on the lawn as she scans her key card through three different checkpoints. She turn over her service weapon and let it get checked before she re-holsters and heads to the shiny elevator wall. She rides the elevator up to the twentieth floor with her crossed behind her back. She is trying not to touch anything, lest she leaves her fingerprints behind for someone to clean.

She is three minutes early. This is why Daenerys is still wearing her glasses and has her nose pointed at a computer screen. Missy lightly knocks on the open door, causing Dany to raise her face, eliciting this wide grin. 

“Ah, it’s so good to see you!” Dany says. “Come in! Come in!”

  
  
  


 

 

 


	19. Grey's mom is pissed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey finally tells his parents the truth, sort of. It yields a result he kind of expected. Missy has lunch with the bestie, who tries to get all of the latest life updates from her girl. Unfortunately, Dany discovers that Missy has this bizarre tunnel vision. Grey tries to go back to work, but after what happened, Selmy is NOT HAVING IT. So, because Grey's been having a shit few weeks, he relents and opens the door for the future love of his life.

  
  
  
  


 

After getting three hours of sleep, he wakes up feeling like real shit — on the inside — but also on his face, his head, his lip, and his back. He sees his hand shaking when he goes to brush his teeth in the bathroom — so he starts rifling around in his pants for the container of painkillers that he was given.

As he chokes down a few capsules, he thinks it would be real great, though unlikely, if he developed a painkiller addiction from this bullshit. That would serve him right.

He finds that his parents are still sitting on the couch, with books in their laps and cups of tea and coffee laid out in front of them on his table.

He tiredly walks over to a shitty IKEA armchair and collapses down on it.  

He mutters, “So I _do_ actually work for the government. That part is real. But I am not a liaison or an analyst. I am an officer. I can’t tell you the specifics of what I do for security reasons — I’m sorry for that.” He gingerly touches his fingers to his cut lip. He softly tells them, “I actually haven’t been lying to you that much.”

  
  
  
  


Over late breakfast-slash-early lunch in her office — because it is the only time Dany can fit in some quality time with Missandei these days — they poke around lettuce leaves and chicken in takeout containers with their forks. Dany is trying to make this as normal as possible. She even pulls out a cold bottle of white wine from her mini fridge and dumps its contents into plastic cups to make it a slightly boozy affair. She is currently giving her sore ankles and calves a rest — she is walking barefoot. She wears four-inch heels at work everyday to give herself height.

Dany is trying get all of the details about Missandei’s hot date with the nice guy software engineer — because in the short text messages Missandei sent after the last date, there were exciting non-contextualized words and phrases dropped like “made out on the couch” and “touched my boobs” and “licked my neck.”  

It all just sounded very promising, and Dany is excited for her best friend to have something for herself for once, not to always been at the beck and call of others.

“And he just started harping on it to death, when I said the embassy in Samyriana used black and white entry-and-exit forms,” Missandei says. “He just got nuts and started getting aggressive with me, telling me they are actually yellow and black, telling me that missing details like that will fucking kill me one of these days. And I’m trying not to challenge him in front of others, but it’s pretty much like — _relax_ , _you psycho._ Do you really think that misremembering the color of some piece of paper is going to result in _death?_ Really? Really? _Really?”_

“Wait,” Dany says slowly, interrupting Missandei’s diatribe. “The software engineer said that to you?”

Missy’s nose crinkles up. “Huh? No. Grey did. Grey is constantly freaking over the silliest things because he has been really stressed out ever since his parents came to town.”

Dany slowly says, “Wait. What happened with the cute engineer?”

“Huh? The cute engineer?” Missy asks quizzically.

“Yes, _Missandei,”_ Dany says, raising her voice, getting a little snappish. “What happened to your promising date! Did you have sex? Are you going to continue seeing him?”

“Oh. You’re talking about Paul.” Missandei sinks back into her chair, slouching, finally refocusing on the topic at hand. “No, we didn’t have sex. Funny that you brought it up, because he’s been texting me and trying to schedule date four. And I’m like — for real, homie? After how date three went?”

“And how did date three go?”

Missy makes a face — like a grimace. “I don’t think I’m very attracted to him.”

“He seemed so nice and cute though,” Dany says. “He has a proper job. He likes to travel and eat. _You_ like to travel and eat. He seems like a really positive force. _You’re_ a positive force. He seems like a good match for you.”

“Yeah, I dunno,” Missandei mutters, swirling her cup of wine around. “I just don’t really feel like getting naughty with him. There’s something about him. And oh my gosh! He kept describing the Airbnbs he stayed at during our dates. It was really weird and unnecessary. It was like, dude, I don’t care how many bathrooms your rented house had or whether or not the AC worked.” Missy pauses. “Do you know that Grey barely sleeps? We’ve been working together for nearly eight months — stayed in many hotel rooms together. And I always fall asleep before him and wake up after him. And for the last month — oh my _God_ , you don’t even want to know what he’s been doing!”

  
  
  
  
  


Grey’s busted face more or less confirms what his parents already know about him — that he works a really dangerous job for a foreign government. In this same job, he was mutilated and almost killed for reasons that he can never explain to them. He clearly has a death wish, because he won’t leave this terrible job. This job has broken him, because he won’t come back to them. Instead, he would rather keep breaking their hearts by putting his life on the line for a fucking _foreign_ government.

Seeing the confirmation of this doesn’t really make it better for any of them. He tells them that he predicted this — he _knew this._ He knew that the truth wouldn’t be comforting at all.

His mother tells him he is missing the fucking point — that the truth to him is just a litany of facts — a list of information. His mother condemning tells him that this is how he rationalizes his lies. He gets to tell himself they are not lies because his mouth is saying factual information.

She puts her hand over her heart, as it beats hard. She looks at his marred face. She tells him, “You lie with your heart now. You don’t even care about what this has been doing to us. You don’t even know because you don’t ask. Do you think it is easy for us to watch you kill yourself? Do you think it’s easy to jump every time the doorbell rings because we worry it’s one of your _coworkers_ coming to tell us you are dead? You don’t care about anyone but yourself. You are _selfish._ You break my heart, and you don’t care. I am _done_ with you.”

He stares at her — blankly. He asks, “What does that mean?”

  
  
  
  
  


Dany listens and watches Missandei’s face as Missandei continues to avidly bitch about Grey and all the little things that he does that honestly sound fairly benign. She watches her best friend’s animated expressions, as this feeling of dread seeps into her responses — as hard as she trying to keep the judgement out of her face and voice.

Dany finally interrupts. She talks over Missandei and says, “Wow, you’re talking about Grey a lot.”

“Oh,” Missandei says, not picking up on Dany’s very quiet judgment. She is assuming it’s just a casual and innocent comment. So she explains. She says, “Well, we spend a lot of time together. We’re working together all the time. And it’s not like I can go home and complain about my coworker to my dad — you know, because of security reasons. And I can’t bitch about him to anybody else on the team because, you know, they all love him and think _I’m_ the fuck-up. So, I mean, you’re it, Daenerys. You’re my only outlet.”

“Yeah, I know.” Dany pauses. “I remember when you guys first started working together — you had a little bit of a crush on him? How is that going.”

Missandei immediately starts cracking up, slowly wiggling back and forth on her chair with her arms cradling her stomach, with her salad balanced on her lap. “Oh, it’s totally great. I am totally over it. Because now I know he’s a freaking psycho!” She is giggling. “It’s like, do I want to hold his hand and make him take a cooking class with me so we can host a dinner party with all of our friends and talk about the latest fitness craze and latest juice cleanse? Nah, I do not want to do that. Can you even imagine?” Missy rolls her eyes, snickering over the very idea. “I mean, he’s so dour and inflexible sometimes. He’s almost totally right all the time, and I have never seen anybody commit so hard to anything the way he commits to his work. And he’s so smart that it’s so intimidating and awe-inspiring and sexy. And it’s like — do I want to see what he looks like naked and scare the shit out of the both of us by trying to do naked things with him? Yes, I _really_ do. _Fuck!”_

Missandei bangs her forehead on Dany’s desk in front of her.

And then with her face still planted in Dany’s desk, she mutters, “I know. I _know_ what you’re gonna say. I know I can’t. And I _won’t._ I won’t mess with him because I love my career. I know it’s just a _bad_ idea. I love your hairpin by the way. Is it new?”

  
  
  
  
  


He tries to get his dad’s help — he looks to his father, and he wearily makes this silent plea — to have his dad stop his mom from doing this.

But his dad looks helplessly back at him — with red-rimmed eyes. And his dad reluctantly starts to help his wife pack up their things into suitcases.

His mom is currently really verbose, as she tends to get when she rages like this. She is shouting at him as she frantically packs her clothes. She tells him that she can’t stay here anymore — she can’t look at him anymore.

She gut-punches him by angrily telling him that she has no son anymore.

He deals with this life-breaking pain by bitterly saying, “Don’t forget, Mom. You still have one son. His name is Azzie.”

She starts sobbing at that — breaking down a little bit — or a lot — as she blindly shoves her wet clothes from the washing machine into her suitcase.

He just stands there and makes himself watch this happen. He saw it as inevitable, so in a way, he was kind of always preparing for this eventuality, in the back of his mind. He can’t be too hurt by things that he can predict. He already knows that _this_ is why he lied and _this_ was what he was trying to delay. He already knew that once they knew the truth about him, they would leave him because the truth about him is so horrible that they wouldn’t be able to accept it or accept him. He was trying to keep them close to him for as long as humanly possible, because he _loves them_ , but he also knew that this was always going to be how this ended. They had a nice final month together, at the very least. They had a lot of meals together. They drank a lot of coffee together. Sometimes they laughed together. Sometimes he came home and saw that everything was perfectly neat and tidy, and he told himself that she must really love him, to do that for him.

  
  
  
  
  


Even though he told her he’d be in, she is legit shocked when she sees him show up at noon. Missandei actually scurries up to him and, with bewildered eyes, she says, “I cancelled all your meetings for you! I thought you’d take the rest of the day off!”

He narrows his eyes at her and holds in a sigh. He says, “Why did you do that? I told you I’d be in.”

“I didn’t believe you?” she says, uncertainly. And then she lowers her voice. She whispers, “I thought you’d be having an entire day with your parents — you know? How did that go?”

“Fine,” he says.

  
  
  
  
  


After what happened the other night — with Grey getting beat by a sex worker and a rusty nail on a wall — Selmy takes one look at Grey and is immediately annoyed and kind of pissed off because everything that happened the other night was preventable. Selmy does not even mince words or afford Grey any extra consideration or dignity — as he transparently barks at Drogo and tells Drogo to send Grey to psych — and then home so he can take a fucking nap.

Drogo’s eyes are torn — as he looks at Grey.

Grey waves it off — like it is fine. He gets it. He takes it upon himself to go down to psych.

There, Sam is busy, because this is outside of their scheduled hours. So Grey spends forty-five minutes waiting in that office, for a spot to clear up. He ends up getting a slot in with Margaery, who remembers him from nearly a year ago, from when she cleared him to come back to work. That was a complicated, political decision.

Grey tries to cut straight to the end. He tells Margaery that he knows he’s been working too much. He knows that he is sleep-deprived. He knows he made a stupid mistake on the job and didn’t read the situation right and didn’t follow the protocol for de-escalation. He knows he put his partner in danger because of his mistake. He feels terrible about it. He plans to take a couple of days off to rest and to get his head back on straight. He will schedule time with Sam and continue the work once he gets back.

Margaery is not his therapist — that is Sam’s domain. So all she can do is assess and clear him to move forward. In her point of view, as long as he really does take time off to rest, she can clear him.

  
  
  
  
  


He goes home to his empty and quiet apartment. The only trace his parents have left of themselves is this plate — this plate of food that his mom made. He touches the edge of the plate and spins it. He uncovers the foil and sees stewed meat in brown gravy, greens, rice, and a fried egg. This is one of his favorites.

He tells himself that this is pretty depressing. Like, he thought losing his dick and waking up alone and dickless in the hospital was pretty depressing — but this might have that beat.

He covers the food up again.

He walks into his bedroom — his bed is made and very neat — and he collapses down onto it, face first.

  
  
  
  
  


Missy is pulling a stretchy tube top up over her boobs as Yara pulls a bobby pin out from in between her teeth, gently pushes Missy’s curls away from her face, and starts pinning her hair off of her face. Missy is staring at Yara’s stomach, as Alayaya and Brienne get dressed around her.

Missy is regaling them all with the story about how a sex worker totally owned Grey’s ass and how stressful that was for Missandei. She is actually trying hard to make him look as good as she can in the story, but Alayaya and Yara are editorializing and snorting out laughter.

When she tells them that the woman, Carla, surprised him by knocking her head back, Yara lets out this cackle and says, “Oh my God! He was headbutted by a tiny woman! Classic!”

“Did he make this face?” Alayaya asks, pulling her expression into a really comical exaggeration of Grey’s WTF face.

Yara points at Missandei’s expression — which Missy is trying to keep even, trying to give nothing away. Yara says, “He did! He did make that face!”

  
  
  
  
  


After she finishes her shift, after she tiredly changes back into her real clothes and slaps a high-five into Yara and Yaya’s hands, after she jumps to hit Brienne’s hand — she is getting so fucking good at high-fives now! — she gallantly bids them all a good night with a little bow.  

It makes Yara snort and tell Missy that she’s such an adorable little goof sometimes.

Missy pulls out her phone and types out a message real quick. She is texting him, actually. He was supposed to be on the clock tonight, but they shuffled around and actually, Drogo ended up taking up his post tonight. It was weird to have Drogo doing Grey’s job instead of Grey. But actually — it shouldn’t be _that_ weird. Because that is actually every day of their lives.

Anyway, there are a few funny little observation that she wants to make to him about what it was like having Drogo be him, so that is why she is texting him.

His response comes back quickly — which shocks her. It’s like, five in the morning.

He is basically asking her what she is doing right now.

  
  
  
  
  


She knows that this is way fucking weird — it is weird as hell — it is like — there is something going on. She knows this because she knows him. She knows that he would never just ask her to come over if he wasn’t like — if there wasn’t something _big_ happening.

She is deeply curious — and a little apprehensive. Nevertheless, she texts her dad and tells him she’s running late — don’t worry. And then she stops by the only place still open for hot coffee. She stops at a convenience store and fiddles around with the automated coffee machine and gets it to pour some shitty, artificially flavored mocha into a styrofoam cup for him.

It’s a joke — she is pre-emptively planning out ways to cheer him up already.

He tells her his apartment number — it’s 306 — and she is holding his hot coffee as her knuckles rap on the door before the top of the hour.

She says, “Hey,” when he opens the door. She takes in his poor face, his eyes, his poor lip, his day-old stubble, and his clothes.

He says, “Hey,” as he opens the door wider, as he steps out of the way so that she can walk in.  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	20. Missy tries to cheer Grey up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Because the future love of her life is kind of an orphan now, Missy brings him coffee and company to cheer him up with, because she is a good partner.

  
  
  


 

The first thing she notices — of course — is that he is alone. His parents are not here at the moment. In fact, there is no trace of them at all in his place. She registers this with only mild surprised — because she kind of expected it. She kind of knew that he wasn’t inviting her over to say hello to his folks.

Her eyes curve downward and go sad as she looks at him — for just a moment — and then she strategically doesn’t ask about it or comment on it. She knows that he does not want her to, that it’s not why he asked her to come over.

Instead, she just holds up his coffee. She smiles at him, looks at his busted face and wonders why the key moments in their relationship involves a broken face. She softly tells him that she got him another one. She says, “It’s your favorite.”

He takes the cup from her. He hates this shit, but he always drinks it because she goes through the trouble — of fucking with him. He knows that she’s messing with him, and it’s been cute, so he’s been going with it.

He blows on it, even though it has cooled enough to drink. He sips the mocha through the hole, flinching around the swollen cut on his lip, as he watches her watch him back.

It’s godawful and tastes artificial. He still says, “Thank you,” after he lowers the cup from his face.  

Her smiles widens at that — she even laughs a little bit. And then she takes a small step backwards. She holds her arms out. She says, “So this is where you live!” as she spins around in place. “Gotta admit, it’s not what I was expecting, but it’s nice. Do you wanna give me a tour of the place?”

  
  
  
  
  


The tension between them is thick and maddening. She pretty much knows why she is here. She knew it from the moment she got his text message. All it said was that he was chilling. All it asked was if she was still busy with work. She could have easily ignored it and pretended she didn’t read the message until it was too late and the moment had passed. But actually, when his words flashed on her screen, she knew that she was down. She doesn’t even give a fuck. The rule is stupid and dehumanizing and so much of what they do is already dehumanizing. She is ready for this. She has been been dreaming about this, without realistically thinking that it would be a possibility like how it currently is. She is just waiting for him to make the next move.

Her shoes quietly shuffle against his hardwood floors, as slices of the rising sun break through the slats of his blinds and curtains, as she silently follows him from room to room, as she gives him these secret smiles into his back, as she bites down on her bottom lip and suppresses this groan, at the way this already looks.

They go through the guest bedroom really fast. It looks empty, and he tells her that he stores some of his extra shit in here and uses it as an extra closet kind of. He then leads her out and just gestures to one of the bathrooms. Then she follows him into his bedroom.

  
  
  
  
  


In his bedroom — he has shut all of the shades and covered them with his blackout curtains, so that it’s as semi-dark as it can be — he sighs. He is thinking better of what he is fucking _doing_ right now. He is thinking that he is fucked up scum, and she deserves better than this.

On her end, she is observing to herself that he is _so fucking hot_ . She thinks that he is so _fucking yummy._ She thinks over this fucking alternate universe where he was never cleared to go back into the field, where he stayed in his old department, where he agreed to a date with her, where she got a chance to prove to him that they have a lot in common and a lot of chemistry, like _physical and sexual_ chemistry. She thinks about the many ways in which she can make him feel better about _his body,_ because like Brienne said, he _must_ have dick issues. And they _must be_ part of the reason why there is sometimes such a distance between the two of them — beyond everything else. Like, their fucking jobs. Their fucking training. What they are told they are allowed to do. What they are told they are made for. What they are told they are good at. What they are told is their purpose.

He turns around and he says, “I’m sorry, man.” He sighs.  “I don’t even know why I texted you.”

“You texted back.”

“Pardon?”

“I texted _you_ first,” she corrects, walking up so she is standing in front of him. “You texted back.” She holds her hand out, kind of hovering it over his chest. She is trying not to touch him just yet.

He mutters, “What the fuck.”

She smiles, pointing it at his neck, into his Adam’s apple. She says, “Man, it’s so weird, how you insist on making everything so sexually charged between us —”

He looks confused. He freezes. He quizzically asks, “You think it’s weird?”

She steps forward then — pressing the front of her body to his — pressing her breasts into his chest. Her jaw basically aches at that — at how it feels. She tells herself, oh fuck, she’s in trouble now. Like, _a lot_ of trouble — as she runs her arms over his shoulders, as she presses harder to him — as he groans — as she says, “No. It’s not weird.”

And then she raises her face. She asks, "Can I kiss you?"

He actually appears to seriously think it over. In the semi-dark, she can see a twitch in his jaw. And then he nods. Almost imperceptibly.

And then she lays her mouth on him.

  
  
  
  
  


Her mind pretty much starts screaming and going apeshit in victory once he starts kissing her back. Her heart starts to pound as she realizes that this is _happening_ to her, and it is fucking _great_ . She starts losing the narrative — coherence — and just starts pulling _yeses_ and _pleases_ in and out of her consciousness, as he tilts her head back so far from the force of his reciprocity, as he jams his tongue into her mouth and starts just taking from her from the inside out. Her neck strains against the pressure of his kissing, as her hands dig hard into his shirt and his stomach — they are both flexing — before they both break their mouths away — wet and in shock.

He is touching his lip again — at the cut.

She is licking the outside surface of her mouth — tasting salt, tasting his blood. They had ripped open his tender scab together.

He is looking at the fresh spot of red on his fingertips, as he distantly says, “Oh. Fuck.”

And then she is advancing forward and just mindlessly pushing him — just shoving him backwards down on his bed. Her hands start going to his pants — to the closure — but she thinks better of it. Because she is gonna need to properly ask before getting in there.

Instead, she starts stripping off her own clothes really fast — because this fucking feels like a Halley’s Comet situation and she needs to be alert and she needs to be _on it._ She rips her clothes off in random order, as she starts to sweat, as her skin starts to burn up, as she pulls off her shirt, unzips her pants, takes down her underwear, kicks off her shoes, throws her socks off, and struggles with her bra for just a panicked second — before she remembers the fucking thing opens from the front.

When her breasts pop free, she briefly smiles at him — in relief and elation — she stares at the way he is staring at her — and it makes her exhale. It makes her chest go concave for a moment before she straightens her spine and tries to stop herself from screaming out something ludicrous, like, “Oh my God, I am naked!”

She sheds her bra and drops it on the ground. She mounts the bed and climb up his body, so she can crouch over his face and give him another sloppy kiss.

She feels him flinch underneath her wet mouth. She tastes his blood again. She actually giggles — and says, “Oopsie. Okay, so no kissing from you anymore. Your poor mouth.”

  
  
  
  
  


The pace of what is happening is punishing and really not very romantic or emotional — which is kind of not what he expected from her, through the many, many times he has accidentally allowed himself to think about what having sex with her would be like.

He is having a time. He really didn’t think it would be this easy and that she would be _this_ down because obviously she knows that his body is just fucked up and broken. He thought that would be more of a barrier to _this._ He didn’t really think _this_ was realistic. He really thought that maybe she’d come over and instead of being allowed to physically pour out his terrible and pent up feelings from deep inside through sex, she’d just sit him down on his sofa and would force him to use his words. Maybe that is why he texted her the way he did. Maybe he knew deep down that he needed someone to talk to about what just happened in his life — how he lost his parents because they found out who he is.  

As he stares up at her, as he continues taking in her fucking perfect body, he feels sorry for her — for an entire list of reasons. He’s sorry that she has to deal with his physical deformity, first of all. He’s sorry she has to deal with his mental and emotional deficiencies. He’s sorry he can’t even come close to being what she probably needs and what she deserves — which is a person who is capable of actual intimacy and closeness. He is sorry that he can’t even tell her what he thinks of her — when he happens to think positively about her. He is sorry he is not normal. He is sorry that he is a person who does _this shit_ when he feels like he is losing the ground underneath his feet.

His lip is throbbing and feels like it is on fire — like it is getting burned. His shoulder is sore and twinges whenever he moves it. Both things keep bleeding — so that’s fucking gross and disgusting and he must be so fucking _sexy_ to her right now — just lying down pathetically like this, bleeding out of two cuts.   

He doesn’t know how to tell her that he doesn’t know how to do this with her — he doesn’t know how to have sex with her — if he can’t even use his mouth. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do to make sex any good anymore. He doesn’t know how to tell her he hasn’t done this shit with anyone since his accident — but that must be obvious. It must be _so obvious_ to her that it’s been _years_ for him. And maybe he just _can’t_ anymore.

So this seems like a brilliant plan, to test this fucking _fear_ out with his partner and ruin every fucking bit of trust they have built up with one another. He is such a fucking piece of shit.

“Can I take off your pants?”

  
  
  
  
  


He tells her yes, it’s okay to take off his pants. He has an air of “whatever” about it. He acts like it’s an inevitability.

She makes quick work of it, as he lies prostrate on the bed and completely doesn’t help her at all. He doesn’t lift his hips, he doesn’t tug anything off for her — she just has to rely on brute strength as she peels off his clothes for him. His shirt is easy enough — she stretches the shit out of it. He groans when she accidentally touches the wound on his shoulder. She only gets to press her hands on his chest for a moment, before she gets to work on his bottom half. She takes his pants and his underwear down in one go — and she grunts triumphantly when his feet pop out of the cuffs of his jeans.

He almost starts losing it right here — maybe because he has lost his parents’ respect and their love — or maybe because of his shitty body — or maybe because he just has nothing fucking left to lose in life. He lies there and just waits as she looks at what’s left of him and his injury over. He is preparing himself for rejection. He is waiting for it just to be over already.

In the lengthy silence, he actually almost starts to apologize to her out loud. He almost gives her permission to back the fuck out because he understands that this not what anyone fucking wants.  

“Does it still hurt to be touched?” she asks, gesturing vaguely to his pelvic area. “I don’t want to . . . hurt you unnecessarily.”

“No, it feels numb and dead now,” he tells her. “It’s feels like scar tissue.”

“Oh,” she says softly. “Well, is it okay if I like — touch you? There?”

He blinks rapidly, staring up at the ceiling. He says, “Sure. Go nuts.”

And then he hears and feels her climbs back over him, straddling his body. And then he feels her position herself right on top of him, with her thighs clenched and pressed against his hips. He grunts in surprise as the corner of his eyes catch her reaching down in between her legs to touch or adjust herself — before she lowers herself directly onto him.

He lets out this unexpected gasp — he says, “Oh my God, what the fuck!” like he is actually surprised that just happened.

She laughs a little bit — the sound of it warm and fond.

He assesses. He observes that she is wet, really warm, really soft, and just brave as all fuck — what the _fuck?_

And he instinctively digs his hands into her thighs and butt. He is holding on hard because he is trying to understand _what is happening right now._

She shifts herself a little bit. She twists her hips and rubs herself against him —

They both groan loudly.

She asks, “Are you clean?” a little too late.

He fights to understand what that means. And then he says, “Yeah. You?”

“As a whistle.”

He exhales, staring up at the ceiling. He asks, “Are you on birth control?” He asks because a doctor once told him he now has one prosthetic testicle and one working testicle — rather blandly, as if Grey’s entire life wasn’t just completely changed.

In response to his inquiry, she is like, “Aw _shit,”_ as she grins. “Yeah, I am.” Because this is like, so legit right now. Like, this is _happening_ right now.

  
  
  
  
  


It gets out of control pretty fast and pretty brutally after that.

After that, it’s just blind instinct — just blind touching and grinding and exhaling and gasping, as she tries to get herself off against his body as fast and as hard as she can, through delicious friction. She has already done a kind of emotional and mental preparation, through all of the fucking _dreams_ she’s had about him — and all the ones after the first one have been accurate, physically.

As she repeatedly grinds against him, she runs her hands down her cheeks, and then down her body, down her breasts, as she mutters, “Oh my God, _touch me.”_

She actually means she wants more of his hands squeezing her body.

He totally does not do that. He is too dumb right now. His idiot brain is just silently correcting her in his head. He is confused and telling himself that he _is_ touching her. Like, they are touching each other. Really intimately, holy _shit._

“Oh my God, _here,”_ she says, just taking charge and grabbing his hand and just planting it on her chest. She whispers out, _“Fuck,”_ as she momentarily shuts her eyes, as she breathes out the way this feels for her. She can hear the repetitive sounds of his bed straining and stressing from what is going on right now.

When she opens her eyes again — she kind of smile-laughs — because she is in _disbelief_. She raises her hands to push her hair back and off her neck and face. She piles it mindlessly on top of her head, arching her back, mouthing something silently —

And then she asks, “Are you having a good time?”

He is like, _what the fuck._

He dumbly nods.

“Good.”

  
  
  
  
  


Over time — as it builds and builds for her, she starts letting out high-pitched keening cries after she calls out his fucking name, as she continues fucking him nakedly and pushes heat and pressure into his body, hard and fast.

He keeps trying to hold on — and keep up — as he fights to keep breathing — as he constantly and accidentally lets go of her boob to try to grab her head to kiss her beautiful face. She bends over and acquiesces every time, humming sweetly against his mouth as their lips make contact. He keeps forgetting that kissing her sends shots of sharp pain up his face. He keeps whimpering out the hurt, every time he forgets.

She eventually comes loudly — with a lot of build up and a lot of considerate warning. She spends long minutes telling him that he feels so fucking good — and that it is happening — _soon._ Her communication and her body speeds up and becomes a little desperate and erratic the closer she gets.

She actually starts crying when her orgasm hits, as she scrunches her body up tightly and rolls with it. She curls over. Her forehead hits his collarbone. She lets out this really cute grunt as her entire body shivers — at the tail end of it.

And then she fully collapses on top of him.

  
  
  
  
  


It is immediately awkward afterward. Because there was something so visceral and so awe-inspiring and so humbling and intimate and beautiful about watching her orgasm that he _immediately_ realizes that they have _fucked up_. _Big time._

He says, “Oh, God — _fuck,”_ as he starts blinding grabbing around for _something_ to cover himself up with.

In a daze, she tries to wrap her arms around him, as she sweetly asks, “Grey, did you finish, too? I don’t think you did?”

He laughs out this lunacy. He repositions her body with his hands on her hips, so that she’s not fucking sitting so directly on top of him.

  
  
  
  
  


So he tries to kick her out of his apartment — as nicely as he can — but he is definitely freaking out and he is definitely shooing her so that he can like — get some space to _think_ about this. She can tell he is losing his mind right now. She knows him really well at this point.

He has underwear back on. He can smell her on his body. He is shoving her clothes at her naked body as he nudges her out of his bedroom, and he is telling her that they really shouldn’t have done that. He tells her that they have both made a fucking goddamn mistake.

She says, “Uh, I don’t think it was a mistake at all.” She is holding her clothes to her chest. She is trying to get his attention. By snapping her fingers in his face. She says, “Grey! It’s okay! You’re okay! Just breathe.”

“Missandei!” he shouts. “No amount of deep-breathing is gonna make me feel okay about this!”

  
  
  
  
  


So she finally shows her face at home at around eight in the morning — probably three hours after her dad originally expected her. He is puttering around in the garden when she sluggishly drags her tired butt into the house. She walks onto the back patio and watches him pick out weeds from the garden bed, depositing the scraps into a bucket.

He raises his face and smiles at her. He doesn’t bother commenting on the overtime she must be working.

She answers for him anyway. She says, “Daddy, I am going to take a personal day today — and we’re gonna hang out. Is there something you’ve been itching to do? Do you wanna go to the spa after I take a quick nap?”

  
  
  
  
  
  



	21. Grey is living his best life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey continues having a really hard time with life and is starting to get legit concerned about his mental state. His big boss even sits him down to have a real-talk about what is going on with him. The future love of his life, in contrast, is just fucking killing it all in areas of life and continues to be a real steady and stabilizing presence for him. Finally, Grey does what he always does best with Missy: He says sorry.

  
  
  


 

Her dad doesn’t want to do an entire spa day because it is expensive and he thinks it is weird for a man who is not gay to go to the spa — so they go to a nail salon nearby instead.

As they get pedicures, as she presents three different bottles of pink nail polish for her dad to choose from — for her toes — her dad wryly grins at her and points to a random one. He says he wants to know why she is acting like she is on cloud nine. Did something amazing happen that he should know about, to have contributed to this good mood?

She doesn’t think she and her dad will ever have the kind of relationship where she can tell him that she’s in a good mood because she finally had some really fucking good clandestine sex — like, the forbidden kind of good sex.

So she just tells him, “I’m finally doing well at work! It is awesome!”

  
  
  
  
  


After he showers to get the damning scent of sex off his body, he tries to catch up on a month’s worth of sleep all in a day. He tries to stay as unconscious for as long as he can on his personal day off, because being unconscious is a great way to deal with depression. When he is unconscious, he doesn’t have to think that much about the words that his mother said to him.

And the thing about memory is that memory is wildly undependable. He know this from his training. And also from life.

He didn’t record his mom yelling at him and laying into him, so he doesn’t have a transcript of it. He just has the painful recall that is trapped in his mind, one that, iteratively, gets worse and worse as time wears on. He starts remembering his mom saying things she didn’t actually say. He starts remembering his mom wishing that he had never been born — because that’s the leap that he takes from the moment she said he was no longer her son.

He starts remembering his mom telling him that he was a waste of her love. He remembers her looking at him like he is despicable, like she knows that he actually kills people for a living, like he has to have a personality disorder because he is a manipulative taker who only knows how to put himself first.

He remembers barfing at school in the middle of biology class when he was a high school freshman. His mom had to leave work to come and pick him up. He cried when he saw her face pop into the nurse’s office because he was so relieved to see her. She took him home, gave him dinner, and then cuddled with him on the couch as he told her all about how it was so humiliating for him to barf in front of his new classmates at his new school.

He was only 12 years old at the time and puberty was still a few years away from starting. His parents were always worried about the tradeoff — of moving him ahead a couple of grades versus keeping him with his same-aged peers for his emotional development.

He bets his parents have regrets now — now that he is an ultra intelligent _sociopath_ who can’t fucking form meaningful human connections because all he fucking knows is how to use people.

He tries to keep sleeping so he doesn’t have to remember how he messed up the very nice, very professional thing he had going on with Missandei. He keeps seeing her without her clothes on when he closes his eyes. He feels like a disgusting perv for it.

His memory twists and morphs here, too. The more he remembers the sex, the more lackluster it becomes to him. He remembers doing nothing. He remembers lying there like a cold fish. He even remembers her disappointment in him — when she saw him naked. He remembers her asking him why he didn’t orgasm like how a normal man would. He remembers being too chickenshit to tell her it’s probably because he can’t anymore.

  
  
  
  
  


He dodges his brother’s phone calls until the day before he is due back at work. He has like, ten voicemails from his brother that he’s probably not going to listen to because they are going to bum him out _a lot_.

He picks up the phone just so he can ask Az to just give it a rest. Grey’s going back to work tomorrow. He cannot have his phone ringing every five minutes while he’s on the job. He also does not want to have to block Azzie’s number because what if someone gets stabbed in the kidney and needs a new kidney? He would like to keep the lines of communication open for that possibility.

“Can you stop being so fucking dramatic?” his brother says into his ear. “It’s like talking to Ma all over again.” Azzie is sighing. And then he says, “Baby bro — what the fuck happened?”

  
  
  
  
  


Sam is all worried about him by the time Grey finally shows his stupid face in Sam’s office again. Sam tells him that Margaery reported clearing Grey to go back to work — and learning that was a bit alarming. Reading the report on what happened was also a bit concerning, to be honest.

They are spending the session indoors in Sam’s office today, because Grey is just over living his best life and doing shit like getting therapized around a duck pond. He is tired of this fucking farce. He is not getting better. He is never going to get better. This is as good as he fucking gets.

He wearily tells Sam’s very sympathetic eyes that his parents disowned him. He says, “Which is crazy because we’re a culture where you can be a heroin addict who robs and steals from your parents, but as long as you show up to family dinner, you’re cool and you get enabled.” Grey sighs. He says, “Like, do you even know what it means for my parents to disown me? It is a real big deal. I am like, their son, not their _daughter._ Like, my people don’t throw that shit around lightly. I am a few notches below heroin addict-thief. It’s so fucking awesome.”

“Grey —”

“And I slept with Missandei,” Grey cuts in. “I was upset about my folks. So I was making great decisions. I am a fucking idiot. We had sex once in my bed, in my apartment. It’s going to be great to see her later today. Because we haven’t talked at all since it happened. Fuck me _forever._ ”

  
  
  
  
  


He sees her at their first meeting together — a debrief and a status check in with the entire team. He fatalistically expects for there to be some sort of sign that she _hates him_ now, but all that actually happens is that they run into each other at the donut box — on purpose because she saw him and she made a beeline to him — and she says to him, “Grey! You’re back!”

He is seriously like, what the fuck is this women’s _deal?_

She pats him on the shoulder gently — because she is concerned about the healing wound there. She smiles at him as she lightly clamps a long donut in between her front teeth. Muffled through her teeth and through the donut, she says, “There’s only one apple fritter left! Take it!”

And then she walks to the conference table and takes the empty seat next to Daario, who immediately steals a sip from her coffee cup and teases her. Grey can hear Daario asking her how it feels for her to have her boyfriend back at work.

She says, “Awesome! It spares me from having to look at your dumb face all day.”

It is a bit of a weak burn, but Robb still laughs in appreciation, on her other side.

All of the fun and camaraderie dies when Selmy and his severe mood walks into the conference room.

He spots Grey right away.

And with a _look_ , Selmy is like, “Grey, are you well-rested today?”

Grey wants to _kill himself_ right now. Instead, he gives a short nod. He says, “Yes, sir. I am.”

  
  
  
  
  


Besides the one time he was captured, tortured, and got his dick sliced off — conversations rarely revolve around his work performance. And those series of conversations after his accident were based around his emotional and mental stability, not his abilities or skill set. Usually, that shit, for Grey, is real locked down.

So it is a really fucking terrible novelty, for Selmy to call Grey into his office, for Selmy to shut the door behind them after he asks Grey to sit down.

After they are afforded some privacy, Barristan leans against the edge of his desk, staying close to Grey. Selmy is actually thinking to himself that he has known this person since this person was a child. He was watching and keeping tabs on Grey for two years before he approached and recruited Grey into the organization. He had to wait until Grey turned 18 years old, before it was legal to approach him.

After Grey signed on — he was just _perfect_ . He learned fast. He followed procedure and protocol without erring. He had an encyclopedic ability to recall thick information. He made decisions on the job consistently and logically, as outlined in the trainings. He advanced fast in the organization because he was so perfect. It seemed that he was just _made_ for the life and for the job.

Grey was following orders, efficiently and perfectly, when he and Theon were captured by Bolton.

Barristan remembers the hours and hours of discussion that resulted from that. He remembers pushing back at his superiors who thought that Grey was compromised, forever a liability to the organization, a tumor that needed to be cut off. Barristan remembers the months of going to the mat for Grey — because Barristan knows this person and he knows that Grey is not like Theon — Grey really needs this job. Barristan put his neck out on the line for this person — because he knows he owes it to him.

Grey’s time back has been concerning. They all know this. It is very apparent.

Barristan says, “We’ve witnessed your trademark good work — that never changes. When you’re focused and on top of it — you are our _best._ But son, you know that your time back has also been punctuated with episodes of volatility and just really _poor judgement._ ”

“I know,” Grey says quietly, staring into the wood grain of Selmy’s desk.

“I mean — I don’t want to hear confirmation of what I already know — I want to hear an explanation, Grey,” Barristan says. “Why? Were you not ready to come back to work?”

“No, I was ready,” Grey continues quietly. “I really wanted to come back. I — I’m sorry. I don’t know what is _going on_ with me. I’ve been going to psych and doing everything the doc is saying I should do. And I’ve been, um, trying to take care of myself better — and trying to make healthy, smart choices — but —” He is sighing. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I failed you. I’m sorry I have failed the organization. I will work harder — and I will be more cognizant of my deficiencies and weaknesses. Um, I will review, um, protocol and procedures again. I, uh, can undergo some more training or re-training. I can help you create a performance improvement plan for me, if you think it would help — to put me on one.”   

  
  
  
  
  


He is back in the surveillance van again — because he put himself there. He currently does not trust himself or his decision-making ability that much, and he doesn't want to potentially endanger the lives of his colleagues, so he does the right thing and he brings it up with Drogo and asks to be reassigned.

He listens to johns proposition her all night — he listens to them offer to buy acts and services from her. He tries to look within himself, to try and figure out if this feels _different_ now, because of what happened between the two of them. He wonders if he is too personally invested now, and if that is going to be the thing that results in her being captured, tortured, and then killed one day.

After work, after they are dressed — he waits for everyone else to disperse. Everyone has given him a wide berth today because they know he is in a mood and that he had a difficult conversation with Selmy. He listens as Missandei jokes around with Kojja and Alayaya and promises to send them this email coupon for custom-made hair care products.

When he gets an opportunity, he briefly touches her elbow to get her attention, right before the elevator doors open. She looks over and she smiles at him.

He says, “Hey, we should talk.”

Her expression doesn’t change. She asks, “Like, right now?”

He looks startled. “Oh, I was thinking like — like not right now. But I mean, I’m not doing anything right now. Are you busy?”

  
  
  
  
  


They land at a diner — because it’s five in the morning, and this is pretty much their only option.

He completely bypasses the coffee because he is trying to learn from his mistakes. He is planning on sleeping properly after this. He orders himself a clear lemon-lime soda. He randomly asks the server for a straw, so that he can sip his soda that way.

She orders an entire breakfast plate, with bacon, sausages, hash browns, eggs, and a side of pancakes and toast. She tells him straight up that there’s no way she’s going to eat it all — so they are sharing.

She is watching him closely. She is looking to him expectantly. She is waiting for him to make the first move, because he took her out here after all. She can guess what might be on his mind.

He nibbles on a toast corner that she has buttered and jammed up for him, as he miserably says, “I’m sorry, Missandei.”

“What are you sorry for?” she asks evenly, as she breaks apart her eggs with the side of her fork. She reaches out for hot sauce and starts uncapping the bottle.

“For being so hard on you,” he says.

And this actually surprises her. She was totally expecting him to apologize for the sex and for him to tell her that it can never happen again. She was totally prepared to accuse him of being sexist and condescending — to tell him that she’s actually not just a teenage girl who freaking fell in love with him just because they slept together once — like, get over himself. She was prepared to tell him she’s a fucking adult woman — and that he can't dictate how she’s supposed to feel.

“I realize I was being a hypocritical fucking asshole,” he continues. “I know I was getting on your ass for the dumbest shit — just really minor shit. And then I go and royally _fucked up_ and put you in just a terrible spot — and you responded to that by just being a really great partner and so professional. You were great. And you didn’t shove my face in it afterward. You didn’t heap on and make me feel worse. You took me to the hospital. You waited with me. You drove my fucking pathetic ass to work for weeks. You kept me fed and caffeinated. You made sure I got _some_ sleep. I know you tried to cover for me and my mistakes a bunch of times. You have, honestly, just been so _amazing._ Thank you _so much._ I’m so sorry I didn’t express appreciation before now. I’m sorry I took you for granted.”  

  
  
  
  
  


He is being so serious — he looks so miserable and upset — and that tugs at her heart — so she reaches across the table and lays her hand on his forearm. She squeezes and then shakes it a little, to comfort him — and to get his attention.

He looks up at her with his brown eyes all soft and tired — and she smiles gently at him. She tells him, “It’s okay. We all make mistakes sometimes. I was making _a lot_ of mistakes before you came on and started teaching me and mentoring me. You’ve helped me a lot, too. Like, I’m pretty sure you helped me keep my job.” She kindly rubs his skin with her palm. “Thank you for that.”

He lightly scoffs — not altogether in a self-loathing or unkind way. He just kind of releases a little bit of tension as she takes her hand back and starts diving back into her food, partitioning out bits of it, making him his own plate with a little bit of everything even though he has already told her he doesn’t have much of an appetite.  

  
  
  
  
  


They hang out at the diner for as long as it takes for her to finish eating some of her food — for as long as it takes him to finish the rest of it. It takes about forty-five minutes.

In that time, she lightens the heavy mood a little bit by rambling about her life outside of work. She tells him about how she’s trying to find a new stepmom for herself, through an app.

After Grey responds to that declaration entirely too straight and too seriously — like, he tells her he doesn’t think it’s a good idea for her to pick out a wife for her dad when her dad is not even aware — she rolls her eyes at him and she tells him she’s just messing around. Obviously she is a rational person and understands how these sorts of things actually happen — but right now, it’s just a fun little exploration — maybe even just a joke. She knows her dad does not want to date, but she wants to nudge him in that direction anyway. It will be good for him.

She tells Grey that her brothers are completely not into this at all. They are both pretty wrapped up in the idea that their dad can only love their mom and that their dad should go to the grave only having loved one woman in his entire life — and that is their mother. Missy tells Grey that her brothers are annoying and being narrow-minded about this, that they aren’t really thinking about their dad’s happiness. They are just thinking about their own lives and keeping everything the same so that they are never challenged with change. They are just wrapped up in the past and the memories of their mother. They also don’t live with their dad. They don’t see his life. They think it’s probably fun for their dad to have been a motherfucking badass professional for most of his life — and now to just be kind of a little emasculated and existing as her live-in maid and cook.

She tells Grey that she knows that her dad completely loves her and he’s really happy that he can take care of her — but she also thinks that he should have more in his life — he deserves to have something that is just for him and not about his kids.

She says, “Maybe his new thing to live for won’t end up being a new relationship. Maybe he will stumble upon the bestest hobby ever or meet the bestest friend ever or the find coolest volunteer work ever — I don’t know. But I do know that he’s not really seeking it out right now.”  

  
  
  
  
  


They say goodbye to each other in the parking lot of the diner. She is leaning against her car. He is actually parked right next to her, so he is holding his keys in his hand and kind of looking like he is trying pretty hard to stay cool about whatever is all going on right now. He looks a little out of sorts, actually. And she finds it to be completely fucking adorable.

She suppresses a yawn. She brings her fist to her mouth to cover it. Then she says, “Thanks for listening. You’re a good listener.”

“Thanks,” he says, looking down at their feet. “You’re a good conversationalist.”

She snickers in response to that. She says, “Do you know that I rarely get told that?”

He raises his face to look at her, in response to that. He smiles at her kind of sheepishly — because he didn’t mean it as a joke or a dig. He meant it honestly — like, in a for real way.

“I’ll see you at work later?” she asks.

“Yeah, man. Definitely.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	22. Is Missy too nice?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey continues getting his head shrunk and avoiding the hard questions about his future lady. Missy breaks some rules at work, but not like a rebel without a cause. More like a bleeding heart with a lot of feelings about vulnerable women. Then she gets a dick in the face! Grey meets his future father in law.

  


 

 

Their sessions are less than an hour, once a week. This is why it takes a couple weeks just for Sam to plow through the facts of what has been happening with Grey. Grey doesn’t particularly want to talk about his parents — but he knows he must, because that’s what this pseudo-science requires.

He tells Sam that he has not reached out to his parents yet. His parents also have not contacted him. Why would they? He is not their son anymore. So things are actually going according to plan.

Sam asks, “Grey, how are you feeling about this — honestly?”

Grey swallows. He holds onto a moment of silence. And then, with a lot of effort, he tightly says, “It is fucking devastating. Obviously. I am fucking sad as hell about it. I don’t even want to think about it or talk about it — because it makes me so sad — that my parents don’t — that they don’t —” He cuts himself off, shaking his head. He mutters, “I can’t even _say it_.”

“I’m so sorry you are going through such a difficult time, Grey,” Sam says. “I am really sorry.”  

Grey arms are folded over his chest. He shrugs.

“I’ve met your parents — right?” Sam adds. “I’ve seen the house you grew up in. I talked with them for hours about you. The very apparent thing to me, in those conversations I had with them, was how much they _love you._ I think that’s why your job is particularly hard for them to accept — it’s because they love you so much.”

Again, Grey shrugs. He quietly tells Sam that he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say in response to all of this. So his parents probably love him. So what? So he thinks he loves them back. So what? They don’t want to be in his life anymore. Probably because they don’t like him as a person. Love and respect are different. Love is probably a hardcoded, biological condition. They are probably conditioned to love him because there is an evolutionary imperative to, to further the species. They probably felt love for him so that they’d keep him alive as a baby, so they didn’t just throw him in a dumpster fire like how reptiles sometimes eat their young. Their love for him is probably a base mammalian mechanism.

And then he sighs. He asks Sam “Do you think sociopaths can ever be capable of love?”

“Grey,” Sam says patiently. “I really don’t think you have an antisocial personality disorder. And trust me, I’ve thought about this _once or twice,_ when it came to you.”

“I took an online quiz though,” Grey says, his voice dry and flippant and moderated. “I checked off a lot of boxes. Manipulative. Pathological liar. Shallow emotions. Lack of remorse and shame. Incapable of love. Addictive behavior. Stimulation junkie. Impulsively violent. Sexually deviant —”

“Grey, I don’t think having consensual sex just once in the past year with someone you care about makes you a deviant —”

“Hey,” Grey says dully. “My sexual deviancy is handicapped ‘cause I got my penis chopped off by a psychopath.”

“And how are things going with Missandei?”

 

 

 

Grey understands that he cannot revert and go back to the way he was before his accident. He was a workaholic. All he did was live and breathe work. He spent all of his waking hours obsessed with his job and obsessed with optimizing his team, as well as ensuring that everyone followed protocol and was up to date on their training, so that they all stayed safe. He never took vacations. He had probably zero friends because he didn’t think it was appropriate to be friends with his subordinates. He was able to subside on that life because he felt, with his entire being, that he had a purpose. His purpose was to make the world a safer place for everyone, within a Western government entity that wielded the most influence — so he owed it to everyone to be at his absolute best. The people he was trying to protect deserved the best from him. He was capable of sacrificing and of giving it.

The difference now is that his purpose is shakier. It has no foundation. His impact is smaller and more nuanced and complicated. He is really just delaying death a little bit. Sometimes he tells himself that the labor has to still be worth it.

He has lost a lot of his conviction because sometimes all he sees — especially when a sex worker calls him “just another rapist pig” — is a lack of absolute answers these days.

He understands why his parents have lost respect for him. He doesn’t really have much of it left for himself.

“Oh my God, I fucking hate salads,” Drogo mutters angrily, staring down at his quinoa bowl.

“Yeah, man. Maybe get a different dressing next time. Lemon vinaigrette? Come on.”

“It’s not the dressing, man,” Drogo says hotly, glowering at Grey from across the table.

They have been trying to become friends outside of work. Drogo is leading the effort. They have been spending time together. It is awkward and not especially fun — they don’t know how to have fun with each other when they are not working.

They work out a lot — cardio, hilariously enough, to strengthen up Drogo’s heart. They go on silent runs together. They have been eating terrible lunches together — saying a whole lot of jackshit together. Grey can tell that Drogo is lonely, too. Because it’s lonely being the boss.

This fucking sucks. Grey remembers when they were both in their 20s and just traveling the world together, doing their violent jobs really well and not questioning any of it. He sometimes misses having youth and being stupid.

 

 

 

She logs in Yiantha’s call to her on a weekend in their book, and she also notifies Grey of the contact, as is part of procedure. They have a quick text about it on their work phones. She — with her limited experience and propensity to be a little naive, asks him what he thinks about her meeting Yiantha on her day off. She is concerned with Yiantha, who seems a bit distraught and agitated.

She asks him for his opinion even though she can generally predict his stances at this point. He generally stays by the book. They are cautioned not to blur lines with their contacts in the field. They are not to reveal real personal information about themselves — Missandei has already broken this rule many times over, in bonding with Yiantha because she is not the greatest liar, and it just felt wrong to lie to a person in order to get her help. They are not to engage in any illegal activity — which is not hard for Missandei to stick to. They are to set clear boundaries — which is something she is struggling with, because Yiantha has become a little emotionally dependent on her. Yiantha calls her a lot, just to complain and say really alarming things about the boyfriend.

Over text, Grey tells her: _Your decision._

He writes this because he also knows that she knows his stance. They’ve already talked a lot about what he’d do. They keep realizing that his judgement is not the be all end all though.

 

 

 

Yiantha has a duffle bag filled with possessions to help her get by enough — and a black eye — when Missandei meets her outside of a coffee shop. When Missy arrives in her casual weekend clothes, Yiantha tears up a little bit and explains to her that they should probably go talk somewhere else. Yiantha has already had a thing with the employees inside the coffee shop. They asked her to leave even though she told them she was meeting Missandei. Probably because of how she looks.

Missy pushes her lips into a thin line as she crosses her arms, as she takes in Yiantha’s face. She says, “That’s bullshit. You didn’t deserve that. Do you want to stay or do you want to go somewhere else?”

“Let’s stay,” Yiantha mutters, kind of inspired by Missy's defense of her. “It will take more time to go somewhere else.”

 

 

 

Missy is not the kind of person who feels okay about making a scene in a crowded coffee shop just to prove a point. She is the kind of person that gives stern looks and adds extra emphasis to words when she is pissed off. She stares down the barista and tells the barista that she would like to buy a latte for her _friend._

The barista is entirely unfazed. And the entire thing feels intensely dissatisfying to Missandei. She feels fucking lame. And useless.

After they sit down, as Yiantha twirls her iced coffee around in its plastic cup, Missandei takes a careful sip from her chai before neutrally asking, “What happened to your face?”

Yiantha shakily starts to tear up again — so Missandei can guess what happened to Yiantha’s face. That piece of shit.

Then Yiantha says, “I’m pregnant. I don’t know who the father is. That is why.”

 

 

 

So Missandei puts a hotel room on her credit card for the next week. She rationalizes this emotional decision and tells herself that the messaging that the world gives people like Yiantha is that all they deserve are shitty, dirty motel rooms. This is why it is meaningful, that Missandei takes this woman to a real hotel in a whiter part of town, because this woman needs to see what life can actually _be,_ and she should see that her life has more value that what she has been told.

Missy gives Yiantha some money for food and for taking care of herself, while Yiantha figures out her next steps. Missy presses the key card of the hotel room into Yiantha’s hand and says, “Call me later — if you want to talk some more.”

 

 

 

They have to log all of these types of activities, and when Grey reads Missandei’s report, he looks over at her — sitting at her desk.

She feels his gaze, so she flicks her eyes up to look back at him. She sees that his face is even and blank — and she knows that he is not thrilled with the decisions she has made. She knows that he thinks she is being used — that she is being played by a hooker who is never leaving an abusive relationship. She knows that he thinks that this contact relationship is at the point of diminishing returns and that Missy needs to cut her off. She knows that he thinks that she is trying to save someone and — as he has repeatedly said to her in the long hours they have spent together in massage parlors: People can’t be saved when they don’t want to be saved.

She knows that he thinks that saving one woman does not matter — because what is inherent in their work is that they must always sacrifice one for the lives of many, whether they literally do this through hard decisions on the ground — or whether they do this figuratively, by giving up aspects of their own lives that others take for granted.   

He said it was her call though.

 

 

 

So she just carries on and hopes that her empathy isn’t the dumbest thing about her.

She does not even know what kind of bullshit she is currently witnessing and condoning because she is not speaking up. She keeps watching as her dad opens one bullshit present after another bullshit present. She watches her pops sit like he is the guest of honor in the middle of Mars’ living room. She watches as he opens up shitty homemade card after shitty homemade card from the grandkids, like they don’t freaking get allowance money every week that they can dip into and like, _buy_ something for their grandpa. She is stunned that her brothers didn’t tell their kids to _do better._

She also sees her dad open a box to reveal a coffee cup that says “World’s Greatest Dad,” from Moss and Safi, like they don’t fucking know that Dad is really particular about his coffee and has an entire procedure around picking beans, roasting his own fucking beans,  grinding his own beans. Do they really think that after hours of painstaking work, their dad would just pour that shit into a shitty, hyperbolic mug?

Mars and Zoya got him slippers, which while moderately better than a shit coffee cup, is so bland and so boring that it just says nothing about how much this man has sacrificed for all of his children.

She, in contrast, got her dad a custom-made leather wallet with his initials stamped into it — because she noticed that his current pleather one is in tatters. She remembers that back when their mom was still alive, the two of them used to have these date nights where they put the Mars in charge of everyone, got super dressed up, and went out dancing. With the benefit of hindsight, Missy now understands that their dad was showing love and appreciation to their mom — because she was the one putting up with his really long work schedule, the erratic hours, and the nights of lost sleep and worry.

Her dad used to look really dapper on his days off. He used to take really extra good care in his appearance. He has lost his ability to give a shit about fancy threads with the death of their mom though, just like how he doesn’t really eat Naathi food anymore.

Her dad is already feeling a certain way when he peels back the wrapping paper and sees the box that the wallet came in. He immediately says, “Missy, this is too expensive.” He does not sound particularly happy about this.

She is used to this. She doesn’t care. He deserves it.  “It’s not that expensive, Daddy. I got it on sale.”

That is a total lie.

It doesn’t get much better when he opens the box. He actually sighs. He says, “Honey — it’s too much.”

She ignores that, too. She ignores his awkwardness. She just reaches over and flips the wallet in his hands. She shows him his initials — like he doesn’t already know what they are. She puts up with it when her brothers grumble and lightly make fun of her for always trying to show them up. She refrains from correcting them — from telling them that it’s not about _winning._ It’s about showing respect and love. It’s about dignity. He is the man that raised them. Come the fuck on.

Her dad gingerly puts the wallet back into the box again. He softly mutters that it’s very nice, but he would rather she just save her money. She suspects that he’s not going to actually use it — even though she will bug him about it for a long time. He will probably just store it in his closet for years, where he keeps a lot of his other special keepsakes like photo albums and his wedding ring.

When it’s time to blow out candles and cut the cake — she sees that it’s a chocolate cake with a race car on it.

Her dad does not like chocolate. He is boring and his favorite cake is vanilla cake with lemon curd.

He also doesn’t particularly like race cars?

Zoya explains the cake by saying, “Kaden picked it out himself!”

Missy loves all of her nieces and nephews very much.

_But what the fuck?_

 

 

 

When Missandei gets flashed for the first time on the clock, she’s so surprised by it that her response is a natural response. She yells, “What the fuck! Put that away, sir!” as she puts her arm out — to ward herself against wayward penises — as she averts her eyes.

He is vigorously masturbating in front of her.

Begrudgingly, she gets to be the one that actually arrests him after that. She is so grossed out the entire time she puts cuffs on him — because he releases a groan when her hand grazes his forearm.

Nearly everyone is laughing at her — a lot — at the end of the shift, because she acted like that was the first time she has ever seen a dick on the job or something.

She keeps telling them _it fucking was,_ but they don’t hear it.

Alayaya keeps cooing at Missy and telling her that she is just so precious — just so fucking adorable and innocent and sweet. Daario keeps gesturing at his own dick and threatening to show it to her. She thinks that’s kind of like, sexual harassment? But she is letting it go. Robb and Drogo are just straight up laughing at her, adorning their laughter with no jokes.

And Grey keeps letting these little smiles slip out, before he covers them up with his hand or throat clearing.

She tells them all, “Well, I need a shower after that. That was great, guys. Just a really fun time.”

And then Daario makes it massively weird by saying, “Why are you so scared of dicks, Missy? Is it because you’ve been dealing with this guy for so long?”

All of the laughter _just dies_ in the room after that.  

Even Daario looks likes he really, really fucking regrets what just came out of his mouth. He says, “Grey —”

And Grey sardonically responds with, “Relax, man. I can handle a tame dickless joke, okay?”

 

 

 

He picks her up for their flight at her house. He pulls up to the address that she gave him, and he waits expectantly, watching her door. He waits for about a minute and sees no movement, before he texts her and tells her he has arrived. The door gets thrown open maybe 30 seconds after that, and she steps out in her wifely get-up, in heels and a tight charcoal dress that restricts movement.

With amused detachment, he watches her struggle hard with her suitcase, trying to drag the heavy thing from inside the house to her front stoop, teetering uneasily on her heels — she doesn’t wear heels often, so she probably doesn’t have the calf muscles for them. She always looks precarious on them.

He sees her lift her face up to make direct eye contact with him, her expression pinched and annoyed.

He gets out of the car then. He silently makes his way up the walkway and the three steps up to her stoop. He laughs quietly, as he takes the handle of the suitcase out of her hand and pulls it. He says, “Morning, sunshine.”

Before she gives him a dorky retort, a set of footsteps advances to the front door and a deep male voice says, “Sweetheart, you left your passport on the kitchen table.”

Grey blinks as Missandei’s dad stops and looks slightly startled by his presence.

“Thanks, Dad,” she says, pulling her passport out of her dad's outstretched hand, depositing it into her purse. “Dad,” she adds, face still pointed down at her bag. “This is Grey. We work together.”

Grey quickly lets go of the handle of her suitcase to lean forward and offer his hand to her dad, who shakes it firmly. Grey says, “Hello, sir. It’s good to meet you.”

Her dad starts chuckling at that. He says, “You know, you are the first colleague of Missandei's I have ever met. What a treat.”

 

 

 

As Grey pulls into the parking spot, he reminds her to definitely slap him in the face — if she catches him making a poor decision. He tells her that any decision is fair game. Like, if she catches him talking a lot about safety razors and buying one, just sock him in the fucking face.

She puts on her wedding ring after that. She didn’t want to put it on at home, with her dad around.

She nudges her rolling suitcase with her knees, after he pulls her luggage out of the trunk of the car and sets it in front of her. They do one last check in the airport garage. He flicks through all of their aliases’ identification documents to ensure that it is all consistent before pocketing it all in his inner breast pocket. They slowly make their way closer to the security line, her teetering on her stiletto-heeled boots. Belatedly, she asks, “Um, how does Mr. Smith feel about safety razors?” She is actually referring to him — to his alias.

“Oh,” Grey drawls, pulling his own suitcase forward. “Motherfucker _loves them._ Didn’t you read the folio?”

“You know I did,” she says, lowering her voice. “From top to bottom. No mention of safety razors.”

“Hmm,” he says, as the double glass doors to the sky bridge opens in front of them. A shiny row of ticketing machines blinks back at them on the other side.

He leans over and grabs her left hand — maneuvering his fingers around her wedding ring. He is holding her hand to keep her steady, because he does not want her to spontaneously tweak her ankle in the midst of walking and then bite it hard. He is also holding her hand because she’s supposed to be his wife.

He says, “Come on. I wanna eat a real shitty airport burger on the company’s dime already.”

“Hey,” she says, as she lets herself lightly get tugged forward by the hand. “When are you gonna switch to the sexy, stockbroker personality? I like that one. He’s nicer to me. He dotes on me.”

He snorts. He says, “Okay, rude.”  
  


 


	23. Third date

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey and Missy do secret agent stuff and unwittingly stumble onto a date night. JK, it's not really unwitting at all. Missy is pushing hard for it because she has a major crush.

  
  
  
  
  


He’s probably never been in a legit romantic relationship before. He was always too young for the girls in his grade — and he was an obnoxious know-it-all for the bulk of his childhood. He was and probably still is overly prone to constant verbal corrections and real-time feedback on performance — and shockingly, teenage girls really hated this shit from him.

Things evened out in college a little bit, once he got over the puberty hurdle. There were girls who called themselves his girlfriend, but he was always like, huh? He was initially really bad at reading the interest of women. He had to teach himself that over time.

He had two years of a normal college experience before he was recruited into the agency. He met Alayaya the first week they started. He was kind of really young still and hormonal — she was slightly older and really sexy — he thought he was an adult so they had sex in secret together. It was an obvious secret though, because neither of them had really learned what discretion actually looks like. He used to kiss her in these stolen moments while they were at work, because he thought it was what she wanted, that it was romantic.

He now knows it was just really fucking unprofessional and self-indulgent.

He is kind of taking this trip down memory lane because he feels similarly confused and disjointed again. He keeps bracing himself every time he reaches out to Missandei. He keeps wondering what he’s doing — if he’s doing it so much to really maintain cover or if he’s just fucking pathetic. He keeps wondering what she must be thinking — if she’s thinking that he’s doing his job or if he’s just being pathetic.

He reaches out and presses his hand into her shoulder, after the band comes back after intermission. He knows that she hates this shit. He knows that she is disappointed that the music is starting up again. He is trying not to grin too much at that — because he shouldn’t be so amused that she is so miserable.

She spins underneath his hand. She takes the small step forward and catches his eyes in her gaze before she smushes herself into his body. She holds him in a hug, laying her head on his shoulders, her heels evening their height difference a little bit.

He laughs quietly, as he pats her on the spine. He says, “Just a few more hours, okay?”

“A few _hours?”_ she asks incredulously.

And they hear Jon’s warm chuckle next to them. Jon has told them that his wife also hates jazz. That is why she is not here.

Grey flashes Jon a smile —  kind of a shrugging smile — before he turns his attention back to her. He runs his fingers over her cheek before cupping his hand on the back her neck. He is swaying the both of them on their feet to this utterly rhythmless bullshit, as he gently says, “Okay, maybe _one_ more hour.”

She pouts her lips as she lifts up her face to look at him. She says, “Promise?”

“Yeah, Jen,” he says. “I promise.”

  
  
  
  
  


Beyond the sporadic and utterly amazing hugs she’s been getting from her fake husband, which always serve to jolt her back to life, she currently finds this current job to be really, really tedious.

For all of the complaining she has done about prostitute duty, the one bright spot in it all is that it is never boring. Each night is different and gets her heart pumping — in good and mostly bad ways. Her emotions change by the second, from pity to empathy to revulsion to a resigned sense of duty to maybe straight up fear sometimes.

The fact that she is currently yearning for an adrenaline rush signals that something has changed in her. She used to be very adept at and comforted by consistency and routine. She used to visit her parents on her weekends, cooking with her mom in the kitchen or puttering around with her dad in their camper — this aging, aluminum monstrosity that they took camping and hunting when she was younger. Her parents used to live 30 minutes away in a large house where she and her brothers all had their own bedrooms.

She used to wake up at six each morning for a quick jog before hopping in the shower. She used to drink a banana and spinach oatmeal smoothie each day for breakfast. She used to work diligently at a desk job, compiling, organizing, and analyzing data for the organization, from eight in the morning until about six o’clock every night. She had a set of friends from college that she sometimes met up with for happy hour or dinner. She used to talk about the state of her pension plan as well as the upgrades and repairs she was planning on making to her house. She used to get pretty excited about a potential remodel — about picking out cabinet finishes and tiles. She used to create Pinterest boards of ideas that she shared with her mom, so that they could discuss and debate the merits of single-basin apron sinks in porcelain versus stainless steel.

And then her mom got cancer.

And then she just stopped giving a shit about a lot of things she used to care about. She was first really mired in her mom’s healing and her mom’s survivorship. And then she was mired in her mom’s death sentence and obsessed with the lack of time in life. And then she was mired in a fight with her brothers about how to say goodbye and what their mom would actually want if their mom was still conscious and cognizant. And then her friends stopped bringing her food and calling her to check in because she pushed them all away — except for Dany, who persisted in the face of her pain.

And then she was mired in her dad’s extreme grief and her fear that he would do something drastic — and funeral-planning in the midst of all of that. And then things just kept coming up, bit by bit: The sale of the family home, a sudden old-man roommate, a new job, a new kind of usefulness, a new set of friends, a new person.

Before she even knew it, she is now _this_. She currently just freaking _wishes_ that some sad sack with a really dysfunctional and damaging view of women would just whip his dick out and taunt her with it right now, so that she can have the satisfaction of handcuffing him, listening to him call her an ugly fat bitch or an ugly Black bitch, laughing that off to seem cool in front of her new friends, and processing him so that he can make bail, get a shitty unscrupulous lawyer — and live to flash another woman on another day. She really wishes was she was doing that _right now._

Her current self, she has discovered, hates contemporary jazz. It is boring noise. Songs go on forever. There are no beat drops or hype men telling the ladies to show their booties. The only people who seem to be enjoying this are drunk on fancy wine — and they are exclusively white and of a certain affectation. She has seen a lot of white crew socks at this festival. She has seen a lot of khaki capris. She is glad that she merely has to play the part of tag-along wife. Bored can be part of her persona. He keeps telling her to keep it as close to the truth as possible, so that it is easier to maintain.

“To a degree, that is pretty standard, what the funds in the firm will go into,” Grey says to Jon, looking a little bit funny standing around everyone in his dress shirt and slacks. “The difference with a venture studio is that they will take a higher amount of equity, and they will provide more hands-on support. They may have several VC funds or firms as partners in the studios, so they can increase the level of investments in these companies, to get them to a more rapid rate of growth, in preparation for exiting or acquisitioning.”

Grey learned that Jon was going to be at the Lemonwood Jazz and Wine Festival through some standard grade-A sleuthing: Grey’s fake account is Facebook friends with Jon. Jon posted about it on Facebook.

  
  
  
  
  


Grey is trying to be the kind of hot girl who leaves men forever changed through the strength of her sex appeal. Grey would like for Jon to want to be around him for his magnetism alone, for his aspirational coolness. Grey purposefully overdressed and had Missandei overdress for this truly terrible jazz and wine festival. He purposefully put on crisp slacks and a dress shirt so that he would stand out in a sea of sameness — a sea of white suburbanites whose children all go the same kinds of private schools, who all work the same kind of corporate jobs, who all golf a lot on weekends. Grey studied the shit out of wine even though he hates wine. He studied the past fifty years of jazz and jazz history. He learned music theory. He devoted hours to this shit after he learned that Jon likes this shit. He has mapped out Jon’s vacations from the past decade — as far back as Jon’s Facebook profile exists — and Grey has exclusively talked about having travelled through locales that are adjacent or similar to where Jon has been, just so Jon can marvel at him and say, “I have always wanted to visit!”

Just so Grey can pet Missandei and photogenically say, “Maybe we should go together sometime.”

He and Missandei excuse themselves and wave goodbye to Jon and his friends, because Grey would like to play a little hard to get. Grey is trying not to look over-eager and desperate for attention.

The stiletto heels of her impractical shoes have been sinking in the lawn all day.

This work used to be easier for him — less calculated and more instinctive. He can feel himself overthinking the shit out of everything. It is labor intensive and that is why he feels exhausted.

He squeezes her hand to get her attention. He says, “Do you wanna take off your shoes? Walk barefoot on the grass?”

“God, you are so obsessed with getting me to take off my clothes,” she tosses back, already nudging her feet out of her shoes.

He gives her a small, tired smile — because he’s a good sport — as he generally ignores that. He reaches over to grab the straps of her shoes, carrying them for her.   

  
  
  
  
  


“I thought this place was supposed to be a foodie’s paradise, what the hell?” Missandei mutters.

“This is a huge event with a bunch of event sponsors,” he explains to her. “You are probably eating the terms of a sponsorship agreement right now.” He kind of rolls his eyes at himself. Because he’s like, so fucking fun sometimes. With his _facts._

“That’s so annoying!” she declares, digging around in her paper cup with her for a good chunk of squid or clam or fish in her chowder. “I heard that Lemonwood is known for just really bangin’ ceviche and fresh fish that is still twitching when you eat it because _it’s so alive.”_

He actually told her not to eat that chowder — because it’s not smart to risk food poisoning while traveling for work. He generally subsides on food from big chains while he is traveling. Or prepackaged food rich in sodium like corn chips and beef jerky.

She thinks it is utterly sad and ridiculous. She assures him that she has a stomach of iron — she can’t get sick. She nicely bullied him into stopping at some food vendors and trucks on their way out. She is trying to stuff his face with seafood that has been sitting on some really suspect melting ice for hours

“It probably has a great food culture,” he says reasonably. “Just not right here. You should just come back here on your own time. Then you can explore and eat whatever raw shit you want and get mercury poisoning.”

“Fun fact time!” she says, holding out this fork with dripping creamy orange stuff to him. “At home, you know, on the island, there was a legend about our butterflies and how they made people _crazy_ and gave them this death fever that made their skins melt off. Honey, open your mouth.”

They are stuck in this in-betweenness, where they don’t have an audience to perform for anymore, but they also can’t just be _themselves_ out in the open like this. This is why she doesn’t refer to Naath or to him by name.

This is also why he reluctantly but obediently leans a little bit forward toward her fork and opens his mouth.

She gleefully deposits a piece of overcooked shrimp onto his tongue.

“Why are you eating this with a fork?” he asks. “You didn’t think a spoon would make more sense?”

“Okay, how dare you,” she throws back right away, scraping around her cup for more seafood treasures. “They were out of spoons. And I’m actually not _an idiot,_ babe.”

He suppresses a smile. “So what were you saying? About the butterfly fever?”

“Oh!” she says peppily. “Our people later learned it wasn’t the butterflies at all. It was mercury poisoning! From all the contaminants from industrialization that the Western world has introduced into the planet-wide ecosystem! My people eat a lot of fish. Children have a higher-than-average rate of developmental problems at home now! Science!”

She offers him another morsel from her shitty chowder, which he also takes into his mouth.

He says, “Hey, that _was_ a fun fact. Good job.”

  
  
  
  
  


After she dumps her shitty chowder into the garbage, she convinces him to take another detour in their rental car — to a real legit dinner — because she is still hungry. He tells her they can stop at the grocery store to buy her sandwich or a box of crackers or whatever it is that she feels like she needs to eat to keep her figure.

The burn is so bizarre, so off-base, and also so oddly specific that it manages to be really funny to her. She giggles at him and asks him if he — a spectacularly intelligent individual — really thinks that _sandwiches plus carbs_ are really the way that superficial women like her maintain their figures.

He smiles at that. He also tells her that they have a lot of work to do tonight, because they have ignored their emails all day. They have a lot of shit waiting for them on their computers that they need to get to so it doesn’t pile up.

She tells him that she fucking loves how he’s always all about work.

Not.

He asks, “Why are your comebacks always so old and tired?”

“Uh, because my dad is my best friend,” she volleys back. “And he loves my material!”

Grey’s about to tell her that she’s such a dork sometimes, but then she flashes him her phone — and he can’t fucking look at it because he’s _driving_ — before she starts rambling on that this restaurant is really well known for its paella. She kind of trails off, leaving him to fill in the blanks of what she is angling at.

He says, “Miss, paella takes _eons_ to fucking make, are you crazy?”

“I’m sure they have a system,” she says vaguely. “They’re a freaking successful restaurant! I’m sure it’s ready quick.”

  
  
  
  
  


He ends up agreeing to a real dinner instead of a quick stopover for calories that they can shove into their faces as they quietly work on their computers in their hotel room. He agrees because she ends up begging and pleading with him in the car. Her voice is syrupy and womanly — soft and kind of breathy, as she repeatedly says, _“Please,”_ and, “Come on, Grey, _come on,”_ to him. He gives up and agrees to dinner just to get her to fucking _stop_ talking to him like that.

They don’t have a reservation, obviously, but it’s late enough that they manage to get a seat after fifteen minute of waiting. He is grinding his teeth over the fifteen minutes. She grabs his shirt in her hands and tells him that it’s just _fifteen minutes._ She tells him that the fifteen minutes will definitely be worth it.

Once seated and situated across from each other, at a small table — he learns that he was _right._ Paella _does_ take a long time, even with a _system._ They are astractly told to allow for extra time for the paella.

He tries to order pasta after that — because that’s fast, right? But she fucks with his efforts by ordering paella anyway. She is warned by their server that it’s a lot of food, and she gamely says, “It’s okay!” as he thinks better of their choices and cancels his pasta.

After the server leaves, he looks her in the face. And he asks, “Did you just manipulate me?” He puts his arms out, gesturing to the entire restaurant — to the mood lighting and all of the couples around them and the utterly romantic atmosphere. “Like, did you orchestrate this?”

She actually didn’t — not entirely anyway. She honestly really just wanted real food. And she honestly read a really good review on this place.

She might have pressed hard on the things she remembers saying to him, though — in the middle of sex — to freak him out a little bit. She might have done that a little bit on purpose.

She smiles at him, evidently pretty proud of herself and where they are at. She whispers to him near silently — just in case anyone else is listening in. She whispers, “Third date.”

  
  
  
  
  


At some point during dinner, she realizes that she’s probably not going to be able to work tonight at all — because she’s loopily on her fourth glass of wine. He is obsessed with this because they were _just_ at a wine festival with a stupid-high ticket cost, and she is waiting until _now_ to sample the local offerings?

She giggles at him like a lunatic. She just shrugs in response to his words. She thinks that the heart is just irrational, and it just wants what it wants when it wants it sometimes. They can’t always predict how they will feel from one moment to the next.

When their paella _finally_ comes, she digs in heartily — she acts like she hasn’t eaten in days. She lets out this guttural groan through her stuffed mouth. She asks him, “Wasn’t this worth the wait?”

He straight up says, “No, man. It wasn’t.”

She cracks up at that, spitting out a little bit of rice back onto her plate — and she catches him smiling at her for a really pure and bright moment — before he realizes what he is doing and he mentally punches it all back down.

  
  
  
  
  


Her bladder becomes an issue because of all of the wine. She leaves him to settle the bill as she goes to the ladies room — she avoids listening to him grumble about how dinner costs too much, and it’s not cool to let the organization foot this bill. She avoids telling him that in her old job, she once saw an officer spend a few grand on a few ounces of blow, so this dinner is _fine._  

She has to pee _again_ when they get back to the hotel room. She shuts the door to the bathroom behind her as she struggles with her dress again — pulling her tight skirt up her thighs, up to her waist, before she pulls down her underwear and plops down on the toilet.

After flushing, after washing her hands, brushing her teeth, washing her face —  she is staring at her face in the mirror.

She actually looks happy. She looks like she had fun tonight — for the first time in a really, really long while.

And then she pulls the skirt of her dress fully back down, before she unlocks the door and walks back out into the hotel room.

  
  
  
  
  


He is thinking that — based on how this night has been going — he should sleep on the sofa instead of getting into the king-sized bed with her.

He is already camped out on the sofa when she exits the bathroom — with his glowing computer in his lap and his shoes off. He has to try and walk past her to get to his turn in the bathroom.

She grabs his hand. She lightly pulls on it.

  
  
  
  
  


So he says no to her — again.

She understands the meaning of his no right away — again. Her face softens as she looks up at him — because he is still _so freaked out —_ and she calmly asks, “Why no?”

He cuts eye contact and evasively says, “We’re working right now.”

“What if we weren’t working right now?” she asks. “Would it still be a no?”

His eyes flicker. She is staring at him _hard_. He is pausing with uncertainty — he is _hesitating_.

And _that_ is _all_ she needs to move forward from this.

She smiles a little bit. She reaches out her palm and she kindly pats him softly in the center of his chest a few times. She says, “Okay, I respect that.”

And then she names it. She says, “So no sex while we are on the clock. So we’ll wait.”

  
  
  
  
  


She knows it means something to him — and she knows that he was a really good sport and indulged her _a lot_ tonight because of what he has learned in the recent past.

This is why she puts on her sweats and a t-shirt, piles her hair on top of her head, ties it up, puts on her glasses, and carves out this space for him to sit, next to her in bed. They can see each other's screens this way.

“Alright,” she says, cracking her neck. “I am pretty sure I type faster than you, and you are way more sober than I am — which is annoying, but it will help us accomplish this. So why don’t you dictate to me, I’ll drunkenly type, and we’ll bang this report out in no time?”

  
  
  
  
  



	24. Is Grey gonna let himself date Missy or WHAT

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey spends this entire chapter all up in his feelings because his feelings scare him so much. Aw, boo. Missy spends this chapter patiently waiting, like she knows the future love of her life spooks easily and cannot handle direct eye contact for very long. Missy continues to work on acquiring a tighter circle of lady friends. She gets assaulted — again — for being awesome.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He is a master compartmentalizer due to years of removing himself from the work that he was doing, so he deliberately shuts Missandei’s haunting words into a dark corner of his mind, shuts it down into the dark, and he just makes himself forget about it enough for him to continuing doing his job.

They spend another mind-numbing day listening to shitty jazz, sipping wine that tastes like wine, and nibbling on fried foods dipped in a mayonnaise dressing as if they are not both going to have go hard on the treadmill for hours to work it off.

Seeing an opening with Jon, Grey not-so-subtly brags about his golf prowess based on all of the articles he has recently read about golf, which impresses Jon quite a bit — enough to suggest that he and Grey play a round in the near future. Grey gives this enigmatic and chill half-grin in response to that, as his mind thinks, oh fucking _great._ He has to learn how to golf now.

He is so tired and so grossed out by himself that by the time they are set to head back to King’s Landing, he is only capable of putting out five words an hour. Most of his communication is in grunts and hums.

She is unfazed. She lets him stand around silently as she checks them out of the hotel. She lets him stand around doing nothing as she checks them in for their flight. She even drives their rental back to the airport and deals with the attendant as he quietly pulls their bags out of the trunk.

She lets him sleep on the plane as she watches a movie on the small screen in front of her, with his hand warmly sandwiched in her palms. He doesn’t pull away because he thinks that it would be hurtful to her, if he did that. He just lightly pinches her fingertips in between his thumb and forefinger. He feels her manicured pink blunt nails bite a little into his skin.

Before he completely fades away, he wonders to himself what they are even _doing_ together and how long he can keep pushing off a difficult conversation with her.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missy doesn’t think it’s smart to hold everything that she is feeling inside — but the problem with her job is that it disallows her from giving away these unsanctioned parts of herself. She cannot tell her non-work friends that she currently really likes a guy who is very complicated to like because of their work situation. She cannot sit there and listen to broad and overly simplistic advice about how she should just quit her job in order to pursue a relationship — or how she should give up the idea of the guy in order to not jeopardize her career. She already knows both of these things. She wants to talk about him with more specificity than this.

She is not altogether sure how appropriate it is, to casually invite just Alayaya out to drinks after work — but she still throws it out there. Missy primes Yaya by telling her, “It’ll be fun! We don’t hang out enough! Sisters gotta stick together!”

Yaya looks at Missy like, uhh, what the fuck?

But Yaya agrees to drinks anyway.

Missy’s general logic is that she cannot really talk to Dany about him because Dany is “the man” and Daenerys has also repeatedly warned Missandei to _not_ have sex with the guy if Missy values her career, and not only did Missy completely not listen to that sage piece of advice — she pretty much went and had sex with him like, the _day after_ getting said sage advice. Missandei can already guess what Dany’s disapproving response would be.

It’s probably the first time since they have met, that Missandei has willfully kept something from Daenerys.

  
  
  
  
  


Grey continues repressing his feelings and ignoring everything that is going on with Missandei and his parents, against Sam’s counsel. He already thinks it’s dangerous for him to tell Sam the truth like this, because Sam could just report him to leadership. Sam could just put in a recommendation for Grey to get moved to another team because his judgement is irrevocably compromised.

It just makes Grey feel sick — with how terrible putting trust in someone else sometimes feels. He feels sick and unguarded and unprotected, leaving himself open like this, like he is an idiot and like he was too stupid to take in the most important points of an entire decade of training.

Sam says, “Grey, it’s okay. You can put your trust in me, okay? I won’t betray it. I promise.”

Grey uneasily says, “That’s exactly what eventual traitors say, to ply you into believing that they won’t betray you.”

“I’m not going to turn you in for this specific thing.”

“Okay, that’s a really careful way of wording it.”

Sam sighs. “Well, I worded it that way because I _would_ have to report you if I learn that you did something many levels up — like if you become coercive, if you become violent, if you abuse your power, if I suspect other kinds of abuse —”

 _“Awesome,”_ Grey cuts in, just gripping the pillow in his lap so hard. “Didn’t we just get done talking about how you don’t think I’m a sociopath?”

“Grey, you like someone,” Sam says, calmly recapping. “She seems like she is reciprocating — fairly strongly. That is _great._ That’s really big for you. And no one needs to lose their job just because of _feelings,_ you know?”

“Yeah,” Grey mutters. “People only lose their lives because of _feelings._ No big deal.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He knows he is just biding time. He knows he inevitably has to deal with his issues. He just figures that he’s in no rush to get any definitive truths hammered out on these things. He figures he can continue skating by a little bit longer. Like, right now he doesn’t need for his mom to tell him again — that he constantly breaks her heart by being what he can’t help but be. Like, right now, he doesn’t need to listen to Missy spew so much hope at him, based on a severe overestimation of who he is and what he is capable of. Like, what does she even _want_ from him?  

Right now, he doesn’t need to dispel this myth about himself, because it feels nice — the way she currently looks at him. The way she currently respects him. The way she smiles at him. The way she inexplicably wants him.

He’s being a coward. He knows this.

He spends all of his free time outside of work trying to get passably good at golf. He does a quick check around and fairly easily learns that Podrick was on his high school’s golf team and continues to be a hobbyist. Grey offers to pay Pod for his time, to teach Grey how to play golf.

Pod is a soft-hearted idiot, because he tells Grey that he would gladly teach Grey for free — of course he would!

Grey would rather keep their relationship transactional and professional — he cannot fucking handle another personal relationship with someone he works with — so he tells Pod to not be an idiot.

He tells Pod, “Just fucking take my money.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


When Yaya shows up to drinks with Arya and Kojja in tow, Missy’s face falls.

Her expression is so blatant and honest that it makes the three other women laugh. Yaya gestures to Kojja and says, “What? She’s a sister, too.” And then she gestures to Arya. “She’s honorary.” And then more truthfully, Alayaya adds, “My meeting with these two ran over and I tried to cut it short by telling them I needed to be on my way out to meet you. They invited themselves. Sorry I ruined our date, babe.”

Missy says, “Of course! Of course! The more the merrier!” and quickly tries to be hospitable even though she like, isn’t even the host of this impromptu shindig. She barely knows Arya. Arya is head of an entirely different department — black ops.

Missy still pulls out chairs for Yaya and Kojja. She still leans over to apologetically ask the next table over if they are using the vacant spare chair that is just sitting there.

The male half of the couple jokes with her. He dryly says, “Yes, we are using it.”

And Missy’s face grows warm as she gets flustered. She says, “Oh, erm, okay. Well, sorry to bother you.”

She still has a tendency of apologizing too much when she is anxious and thrown off guard.

“I’m kidding!” he says loudly, reassuring — as he also laughs at her. “It’s all yours!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei doesn’t get to ask Alayaya shit about Grey because she is too self-conscious to do it in front of Kojja, who is also his friend, and Arya, who used to work on the same team as he did.

It is probably for the best anyway, because sometimes she doesn’t even recognize herself — this moony-eyed version of herself.

Instead, they all just talk shop in code. They mostly just gossip about the people they work with. Missy learns that she’s the least impressive of all the women at the table. Both Alayaya and Kojja are team leads. Arya is the second youngest director in the history of the organization. She is also the first female director. Missandei recalls that the first youngest director in the history of the organization was Grey.

Missy learns that Arya has some healthy or not-so-healthy competition going on with her brothers, mostly Robb. Missandei is like, “Oh, your brother’s nice,” all politely and casually. Because he is.

Which results in a snort from Arya.

Which makes Missy go, “Is he not actually nice?”

Which makes Arya blithely explain, “He is very _nice.”_

Which makes Kojja smirk and say, “He’s a _peach.”_

Which makes Yaya make a goofy face before saying, “He’s _heroic.”_

Which makes Missy feel very much like the awkward, unnecessary fourth wheel of a really cool tricycle that just wants to be a tricycle.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey doesn’t really need to talk to Drogo or Selmy or fucking HR with any explicitness to know what would happened if Grey tries to date Missandei. First, he’d have to be presumptuous. He’d have to take a risk with her and hope that she is down for the same risk as he is. And then he’d have to decide that what they have is serious enough to be reported — if there is longevity in what they have. And if he decides in the affirmative, he’d have to report it because that is the policy, and he’s on thin ice. He can’t ignore protocol because if he gets caught, he is just fucked.

After reporting a relationship, one of them would have to get reassigned. She has made it clear to everyone that she likes field work a lot, and she doesn’t want to go back to a desk. He doesn’t really have the technical background to work cyber. He doesn’t want to go into drugs. Honestly, the human trafficking team is a good racket for him and his skillset.

He doesn’t want to go back to black ops. He doesn’t want to constantly travel and constantly fight time zones. He doesn’t want to make his body adjust to different climates on a dime. He doesn’t want to go through the kind of heavy preparation that that work requires. He doesn’t want to worry about what it’s going to be like for his parents to get that visit from one of his colleagues, telling them that he is dead because he made some _really bad_ choices. He doesn’t want to end up almost drowning in a pool of his own blood again. He doesn’t want to wake up physically damaged again. He doesn’t want to wake up only to learn that most of his team died under his leadership, because he had to make impossible choices. He doesn’t want to be forever haunted by his choices.

He doesn’t want to only be good at killing people. And he doesn’t ascribe much meaning to things, and he doesn’t ever qualify what he is currently doing as redemption because it isn’t — but he just thinks that he has finally found a nice middle ground it in all — doing the work that he currently does. He’s in danger constantly — but not like before. He is equipped and trained to handle the stress and the pressure of the work — but the amount of it is smaller, so it won’t break him like it did before. He has a nice apartment. He has a nice set of friends — including her. He has a pretty nice existence.

“Christ, what is with this boat?” Drogo grumbles, throwing his flip flops into said boat before he hikes himself into it. “Do you not get paid enough?”

“Thanks for inviting the boss, Grey,” Daario says, holding onto rope, wearing a captain’s hat that he probably got from a costume store.

“Yeah, don’t mention it,” Grey mutters, untying Daario’s boat from the dock.

As he told Sam early on in therapy — he just isn’t about letting some hot bitch ruin his entire life and everything he has fought so hard for — just because she smells so nice and is so fucking effortlessly amazing.

“You better not boss me around on my Saturday, other D,” Daario murmurs, as he navigates them out toward open water. “I’m the captain of this ship, ’mmkay? Beer me, first mate.”

Besides, it does not make sense for Grey to risk everything, just for a few weeks of bliss — before she realizes that he is not what she expected at all.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She pretty much knows that he is continuing to process that moment when she told him that they are going to have sex again, with such confidence. She speculates that he probably doesn’t get told stuff like that all that often because that was the first time in her entire life she has been so bold and so forward with sex. Usually, she has to shield herself from the desires of men. Usually, like with software Paul, she has to shove men off of her. Usually she has to stop herself from flinching in disgust, when men on the job proposition her with their money, as if sex is transactional and emotionless, as if she is only just a vessel for them to purge their secret base needs into — and not like, a full person.

She knows that Grey is trying to make some decisions — and she likes that he is taking a long time — because it means that the decision is a hard one for him.

She finds that she is a little bit more looser with rules than he is — and she honestly has always considered herself a huge rule follower so it is shocking to her, that she is turning out to be such a rule-breaker.

But she has been finding herself putting hotel rooms on her personal credit card because because she felt it was the right thing to do. She has been finding herself showing up to her colleague’s home and taking off all of her clothes in front of him, in his bedroom, just because she wanted to. She is constantly moving the line of propriety around in the sand. She just believes that people are individuals and individual considerations must be made sometimes, depending on the person. She just believes that they aren’t just all cogs in a machine.

She understands that this could be just her naivete blaring out. She understands she could just be one of those stupidly idealistic people who eventually gets beaten down by the coldness of life later on. She understands that she wasn’t disfigured and left to die on the job. She understands that her life has been cushy up until now and maybe she will never understand what he went through and how hard it is for him to let anyone in.

Grey is in her ear along with Daario, when another john asks her — _again —_ how much anal costs.

She says, “Two hundred.”

And he recoils at the price. He actually asks, “Are you really good at it?”

She responds with, “How can someone be good at it, really? I just graciously accept the dick. Are you down? Two hundred?”

“What?” he says. “Well, luckily I just got a raise today. I am down, darlin’.”

“Two hundo for ass?”

“Yes, two hundred for your ass.”

“Great!” she says. “I’m looking forward to this!”

Then she signals her team.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Yara suddenly pops her on the ass like how Drogo occasionally pops his male team members on the ass — that is, really _hard_.

Missandei jumps and then yelps in pain as she covers up her butt with both of her hands, just in case Yara decides to go for a second round.  

Which is smart because Yara totally tries to go for a second round. She has her hand locked and loaded and is pulling back, right as Drogo watches this go down tiredly says, “Please stop assaulting Missandei — I can’t believe that’s not the first time I have to say this to you people.”

Yara gets another good hit in, on the uncovered side of Missandei’s butt, before Missandei squeaks and jumps away, before Yara starts cackling loudly and saying, “I love that booty. That’s a crime-fighting booty. That is the booty that will single-handedly free legions of slavery victims.” And then, as her laughter slows down into amused chuckling, Yara asks, “Did you give yourself a raise tonight or what? Two hundred?”

Missy is trying to stop herself from laughing too — because she is trying to do that cool thing that Grey does — which is maintain a straight face as he says really crazy shit. She is failing hard at this. She is giggling as she says, “I felt like I had earned it! I felt like I’m worth it!”

“Bitch, who are you?” Yara asks. “I _love it.”_

  
  
  
  
  
  


When he walks up to her at the end of the work day — at four in the morning — she smiles tiredly at him as she continues rubbing her sore butt. She is looking forward to going home and pulling down her pants in the privacy of her bathroom, to see what kind of damage Yara has left on her ass.

She also completely notices that he is walking up to her with such _purpose_.

She says, “Hey, what’s up?”

He does a quick check to make sure that nobody is around. Then he says, “Okay, so do you want to go on a date together like, for real? Like a real date?”

She starts at that. Her head lightly ricochets back as she says, “Do you really mean like, a _real date?”_

“Yes?” he says with uncertainty, because she is just repeating what he just said to her. And them more firmly, he says, “Yes. We’ll do that dinner you’re always bugging me about.”

She smiles at him — just _so much_.

He actually looks ill.

But it’s okay. She gets it.

She says, “When?”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	25. Missy shows Grey a good time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey tries to not be attractive to the future love of his life by bringing the normcore super strong, but she is impervious to his efforts. Missandei suffers from the unfortunate tendency of being very accepting, very empathetic, and very caring. Poor Grey. How much can one man withstand, really?

  
  
  
  


He pulls out his phone and checks his calendar before setting a date for their date. She blinks but tries not to look so stunned when he gives her a few days that are at the end of the month — more than two weeks away. He gives her a Wednesday, one Sunday, and a Friday.

She has a dinner planned with a friend on the Friday, but she lies and tells him that she is available that day. She makes a mental note to reschedule dinner with Irri because she’d like to go on her first real date with him on a night where they can stay up late and then sleep in the day after.

Right when she thinks this, right as she rationalizes her decision to herself, something small and quiet inside of her shivers. She is being so presumptuous.

“Cool, so the thirtieth,” he says, muttering into his screen. “Sending you a cal invite.”

“Oh,” she says. “Please send it to my personal account — not work.”

“Of course,” he says. And then after a pause, he says, “What is your personal email?”

  
  
  
  
  


He has these strict plans to be unapologetically himself, so that she will probably realize the grave error of her thinking. He has realized that he presents too much — and too well. He realizes that at least every aspect of him that she sees has been managed, from his persona as a ultra-confident, ultra-relaxed, ultra-cool banker husband who is gonna get good at golf — to his persona as a government employee who tries to be a team player, who looks forward to Taco Tuesdays each week.

She doesn’t get to see how boring he is and how his current favorite hobby is sitting around in the dark, watching infomercials at odd times of the day. She doesn’t see the pointless hours he has devoted to a game that he has discovered he hates a lot because it’s a low-contact sport. She doesn’t see the time he spends in front of a mirror, practicing his lies so that they will come off effortlessly and convincingly. She doesn’t see how he is bad at avoiding his real Facebook account. He keeps logging on and seeking out photos that his extended family post. He sees that his parents are perfectly happy without him, going to get-togethers at Auntie Mima’s house. Like, they do not look distraught and inconsolable at all.

She doesn’t see how much he sleeps on his days off, because he is so bored since he has nothing for himself besides his fucking job.

He asked her out on a date because it’s something that she has professed to wanting. He basically asked her out to teach her a lesson, so that they can finally be done with this shit. And just move on.

  
  
  
  
  


Over the next two weeks, he is calm and collected and she is just ready to jump out of her skin from excitement. She reads hidden meanings into every innocuous thing he says. Like he tells her that her fly is undone one day, after she comes out of the women’s room. She kind of beams at him in response to that, before she pulls up her zipper — which garners this look that makes her think that _he_ thinks that she’s a nut.

She has no one to talk about this with. Their upcoming date is unsanctioned — it is _forbidden._  It is a _huge deal_ to her that he has finally agreed to a date because definitely, in the year that they’ve been working together, she clearly has seen what a big rule-follower he is most of the time — save for that one moment he smacked her in the face.

She has no one to gush about this with. She can’t talk to her non-work friends because of the potential security issues. She can’t talk to her work friends because they all know him and they will tease her mercilessly and she only _just_ became kind of cool to them. She can’t talk about this with Dany, because Dany strongly disapproves and Missy doesn’t want Dany’s disapproval just harshing her happiness.

So she kind of talks to her dad about it. He knows enough to know that he can’t ask a lot of questions when he learns that the person his daughter is excited about is a coworker. He _does_ ask, “It’s not the fella that came to pick you up for your work trip, is it?”

The way she freezes and widen her eyes completely gives her away. It makes her dad seriously worry about just how effective his kid actually is, at keeping herself alive.

It also makes him worry about her judgement. He says, “Honey, isn’t he your partner?”

She tries to make a joke about it. She says, “Hey, it could be worse — at least he’s not my boss!” as she lets out this nervous laugh.

Her dad says, “Hon, are you sure this is a good idea?”

“No of course not,” she says firmly. “But I’m doing it anyway.”

  
  
  
  


As their date nears, they start texting each other on their personal phones, trying to nail down the details. He is excited for her to learn that he is really shitty at planning things in his personal life. He has to do so much logistical calculation and decision-making at work that, at home, he decompresses by becoming just the dullest, most noncommittal motherfucker ever.

He writes, “ _Yeah, sure,”_ and “ _Okay,”_ to her lengthy texts, which offer him ideas on what they can do and eat on their first date. He writes, “ _Sure,”_ right after she lists her first idea, and she has to explain to him that she actually has a list of many ideas. He can pick after he reads them all.

After he reads them all, he writes back, _“Whatever you want,”_ and he really hopes that she is gnashing her teeth on the other end of this conversation.

  
  
  
  
  


So she takes all of his statements at face value, which is something she wouldn’t do with a guy she just met and was interested in getting to know better. She is only able to do this with him because she feels like she knows him so well at this point. She understands that when he agrees to something or tells her he doesn’t care, it is not a mind game. These responses are just the truth. He is agreeing. Or he would prefer that she pick for the both of them.

Which she has been doing. The only thing he vehemently vetoed was mini golf, because he has apparently been golfing a lot and he doesn’t want to be pissed off for their entire date.

  
  
  
  
  


She changes her outfit probably three million times — puts on a million dresses, including a bridesmaid dress and also a really sexy body-hugging dress with lots of cleavage from her hooker stash — before she settles on a white tanktop and her favorite pair of jeans hours later. Her logic is that he sees her in hooker-wear all the time. He sees her in wrinkled business casual all the time at work. He also sees her in her crisp and constricting wifely get-up all the time. He has never really seen her wear her actual clothes.

She lets her hair go loose because she always has it tied back at work or coiled in an updo.

Her dad actually says, “Whoa,” when he sees her descend the stairs with a light blush pink jacket clutched in her hand. He says whoa because he hasn’t seen her look like this in years.

She misunderstands and freezes though. She says, “What?” Then her face falls. She asks, “Do I look dumb? Is this too casual for a first date?” as she looks down at her outfit. “Oh my God, it is, right? It’s just — Daddy, I don’t own a red wrap dress that ties in the front.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


They meet at the movie theater because — he decided — he doesn’t want to pick her up and risk making small talk with her dad, and he doesn’t want to wait for her to pick him up. He also wants to drive his own car, so that he can make a quick getaway if he needs to — he doesn’t know _why_ he’d need to, but he is comforted by the option.

He almost doesn’t recognize her at first — because he expected her to be decked out and overdressed for the movie theater. He doesn’t expect her to match his outfit of a well-worn t-shirt, a cap that obscures his face a little bit — because that makes him feel a little more comfortable, being out in public like this — jeans, and sneakers.

In fact, when she walks up to him, she is giggling and saying, “Oh my gosh! We match!”

  
  
  
  
  


She picked a movie so that he can have the first couple hours of their date to himself — to just chill and acclimate to the utter strangeness of it. She picked a movie so that he doesn’t have to talk to her at all, and she can just be close to him. She also chose a brainless action flick so that they will have something to talk about later at dinner, if they run out of topics.

She can see him gripping the tub of popcorn with a lot of tension, clutching it in his lap like it’s a lifeline. She steals a handful of popcorn from the tub, which makes him flinch a little bit, before she slouches in her own seat. There is a big soda in the cupholder between them, with two straws. They are sharing because it just makes financial sense to — and she doesn’t want to ruin her appetite. She also thinks that he probably appreciates the barrier.

“It’s so funny,” she says to him conversationally, throwing a few pieces of popcorn into her mouth. “I like watching movie trailers so much in a theater, right before a movie. But never on my own or on TV.”

He says, “Yeah, same.”

 

  
  
  


He has a hard time enjoying or focusing on the movie because, well, it’s not a very good movie. But also because he keeps catching the smell of her. She smells like whatever shampoo she uses and whatever perfume she put on.

His heart keeps throbbing in his chest and threatening to choke him out. He is really fucking anxious — he feels this inexplicable dread and this fixation on the utter weirdness of what is currently happening.

She’s eating all of the popcorn. He is too nervous to eat. So at some point, he just hands over the bucket to her and drops it in her lap. It just makes sense to, so she doesn’t have to keep leaning over to refill her handfuls.

  
  
  
  
  


Halfway through the movie — during a really intense showdown — he quietly whispers to her that he has to get up and go pee. Her response is to automatically ask him if he’s sure, because they are about to find out which guy is the real chosen one, and it’s really riveting shit — and he nods and whispers that he’s sure.

Then she reaches up and softly runs her hand down his back as he stands up and just fucking _ruins_ this experience for about eight people, as he squeezes past them and momentarily blocks their views of the screen.

He really _does_ need to go nervously pee.

And then the thought of pushing his way back to his seat, past those eight people again, just to get back to her is honestly just too daunting. If his work persona is bold and forthright because he has to be, his real life personality compensates by striving to be quiet and low-key.

So he just stays out in the lobby for the remaining hour of the movie and waits for her. He thinks that, for sure, the date is going to be over after this. He thinks that it’s going just as he predicted it would — that he is really shitting the bed here.

  
  
  
  
  


She ate way too much popcorn and she’s not hungry for dinner at all, goddammit. She is sucking on the soda as she exits the theater — her own bladder is ready to burst because she’s been consuming the lion’s share of their snacks and then she had to hold it all inside so she didn’t have to get up and miss the movie.

After peeing and dumping the rest of the food, she is wiping her damp hands on the seat of her pants as she spots him sitting on a bench in front of expansive glass walls.  

She asks, “Are you okay?” when she sees him.

He maintains his seated position, as he swings his eyes up to look at her. It looks like he is glowering at her — but really, he is just pissed at himself. He says, “Yeah, I’m totally fine.” And it sounds more than a touch sarcastic.

“Are you hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither, actually.”

  
  
  
  
  


It started drizzling outside while they were in the movie, so some outdoor activities, like walking around, is limited.

He also doesn’t want to invite her back to his apartment because he has all of these shameful memories of what transpired there. And not really just the lackluster sex they had there — but it’s also the location where he had the most brutal fight he’s ever had with his mom. He doesn’t want to suggest going to her place either — that is like, really forward. Also, her dad lives there. He doesn’t want to feel like he is sixteen years old and hopeless with girls again. Except that he is still kind of is.

He’s about to suggest that they actually just go eat dinner somewhere, even though neither of them feel like eating — just for _something_ to do.

But she interrupts his idea before he can even open his mouth.

She says, “Do you wanna go for a drive?”

  
  
  
  
  


She suggests a drive to give him something to do. She knows that he always prefers to do the driving when they are working. She’s been in enough cars with him, going to and from airports, going to and from hotels, to know that he is a really good driver.  

She has him drive her car, for the novelty of it. When he asks her what destination she has in mind, she tells him she has none. She actually tells him this short story, about how her dad and mom used to drive her and her brothers around all the time when they were kids. Her dad and mom would go to parties on her dad’s days off. She’d run around with the same-aged kids at these parties, trying to get her older brothers to play with them. She was always rejected because her brothers have always been each other’s best friend and they always found her entire existence to be boring and juvenile and girly. So she played house with other girls. Everyone fought to be the mom. She was kind of meek, so she often ended up being the dad because someone had to be.

“And then at the end of the night, our folks would take us home,” she tells him softly. “One of my favorite things is actually sleeping in a running car.”

He tries to engage with her on this. All he can do is dryly ask, “Are you saying you want me to drive you around as you fall asleep in the passenger seat?”

She smiles.  

  
  
  
  
  


Fifteen minutes into the meditative but largely silent aimless driving, he calls it out. He cautiously says, “This date isn’t going well for us, is it?”

She actually perks up in her seat — in surprise. She has her hands folded on her lap. She is being honest, as she asks, “You don’t think so? Why do you say that?”

“Missandei, I left you in a movie theater by yourself,” he says, sounding predictably ticked. “I’ve only said like, five words to you so far.”

“That’s okay,” she says, pressing the back of her head into the headrest, lolling it back and forth a little bit. “The movie wasn’t the best, so you didn’t miss much. And I mean, I already know you’re not chatty, so I’m not like, surprised by the amount of talking we’re doing — or not doing.”

  
  
  
  
  


So he allows himself to open up a little bit, too. He reasons that the date is going so terribly anyway, so nothing he does or doesn’t do will change that at this point.

He stupidly decides to go hard and fill up a lot of space, after saying and doing a shit ton of nothing for hours. He tells her something that feels safe — something that she already knows. He tells her that he likes driving. He likes the mechanics of it. He likes the control it affords. He likes machinery. He likes navigation. He likes assessing spaces and planning exits. He likes learning city infrastructure.

The words sound and feel awkward coming out of his face. He realizes that he is listing just fucking stupid random boring shit that he likes, and he wonders what she must think of him — how she must be recalculating her originally estimation of him iteratively, as this date has worn on. Like many others have, she must be realizing that he is not who she originally thought he was.

She actually says, with a laugh, “I _know_ you like to drive. It’s very obvious.”

He asks, “It is?”

“Yep.”

“What else is obvious about me?”

“Hm,” she says, pausing to think. “You actually like moody, introspective movies with annoyingly open and ambiguous endings.”

 _“What?”_ He blurts this, because it is completely spot on. He really _does_ like the kind of pretentious movies everyone else hates. “Why did you pick an action flick then?”

“Because I like them?” she offers. “Also, I thought you would enjoy getting ticked off and ranting on and on about how stuff is inaccurate and how Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson would die real fast in real life because he is clearly not following protocol.”

“Oh my _God,”_ he mutters, tilting his face up to the ceiling of the car momentarily. “I really _do_ fucking love doing that.”

  
  
  
  
  


So, high off of her couple of modest wins, she gets on a roll and excitedly continues telling him more stuff that he hates and likes — with this continuing specific accuracy that just _stuns_ him.

She tells him that his favorite coffee flavor is actually really dark, really bitter, and really black. It is gross and she doesn’t agree with it, which is why she keeps trying to condition him to like more sweetness and dairy. She tells him that he and her dad actually have similar tastes in coffee. He probably likes fancy coffee that takes hours to make — that just tastes like dirt in the end.

She tells him that the look of his apartment was surprising to her because it was so trendy and so curated. She tells him that she honestly thought his apartment would look _way weird,_ like maybe there is just a TV on the wall and a game console. And that is it.

She tells him that he probably likes white soft cheeses that smell like butt. She tells him he probably hates yellow hard cheeses. She tells him he secretly hates Taco Tuesdays. She is cracking up as she tells him that he has probably accidentally referred to Selmy as “Dad” at least once in the entire time Selmy has been his boss, and it was probably really mortifying for him, when that happened.

She tells him that he probably likes pie more than cake. He likes watermelon more than cantaloupe. He might be one of those weirdos that keeps a workout journal because he seems like one of those obsessive weirdos. She tells him that he probably competed with his older brother, athletically, when they were younger. It was probably not even a contest, academically. His older brother probably bullied him a little bit, because he got so much attention for being smart and his older brother felt jealous because of that —

“Stop,” he says.

“Stop?” she asks questioningly. “Did I get that last one really wrong?”

“No, you got it really right,” he says. “That’s why you needed to stop.”

  
  
  
  
  


He stops over at a taco truck that he actually likes — because this woman correctly sussed out that he hates Taco Tuesdays — based on fucking _nothing._ Based on how enthusiastically he eats shitty tacos at work?

He pulls up to the tiny gravel lot adjacent to the vehicle, turns off the car, and then he tells her that they are about to test her iron stomach. He snaps the car door shut as he leaves her to follow.

And then, over entirely way too much food — over piles and piles of tacos and piles of charred peppers — they knock their knees together a little bit, squeezing close together under a tiny awning to avoid getting rained on. He tells her what to eat and how to eat it — and she jokingly tells him she resents that.

He is sprinkling her tacos with hot sauce as he tells her, “You know what I’ve been thinking about you for a long time?”

“That you secretly really want to hit this, but you are just too scared to admit your true feelings to yourself — and to me?” she says, already starting to laugh at her own statement.

He rolls his eyes — at how discordantly dorky this beautiful-ass woman can be sometimes. He maintains a modicum of seriousness, as he tells her, “I’ve been thinking to myself that you’d be a really amazing profiler with more training and education — because think about it — you really like field work. But you _suck so bad_ at lying, and I don’t think you are ever going to get good at it. _But_ you also have such a gift for connecting with and understanding people.”

She is staring at him, with a half-eaten, dripping taco disintegrating in her hand. She is smiling _so hard_ at him because she is bursting with confetti and sunshine on the inside, because he just said something _so fucking nice_ to her — of course folding in a low-key insult in there somewhere — but she doesn’t feel bad about being a bad liar, not at all.

She tells him, “You know what? I’ve been thinking about that, too.”

  
  
  
  
  



	26. Missy has a boyfriend, maybe?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey and Missy continue testing out the waters of being more than work buddies. Everyone in Missy's life, including the future love of her life, continues to try and convince her that she is bad at making decisions for herself. Grey continues just being terrified that he is unworthy of love, and it is so sad. Even though he is sure that his thing with Missy will crash and burn and will leave him ruined and devastated, he still persists because he is brave.

  
  


 

The way he experiences and responds to desire — sexual or otherwise — has markedly changed after the accident. He hasn’t had an opening to ask Theon about whether or not it is the same for Theon — Grey hasn’t had the guts, really — and Sam keeps throwing blanket statements over everything and telling him that the things that he is experiencing aren’t abnormal.  

He also hasn’t had the guts to talk to Sam about sex with any specificity. When Sam cautiously asked Grey how he felt about sex with Missandei — physically — he completely shut down and bullheadedly told Sam it was fine. He acted as if he was chivalrously offended by the breach of her privacy.

Grey may have been just embarrassed that even in his most intimate and honest relationship — with a psychologist — he can never fully escape reminders of the mutilation of his body.

He remembers how relieved he was to realize that his fake ex Tiani was into women and thus had no interest in burdening him with her feminine expectations. He remembers how he wanted to barf in her face when Alayaya put her hand on his injury, on what’s left of him. He also remembers how he laid there frozen and was very internal and fought hard not to panic as Missandei rubbed herself against him. He cannot forget how he often wakes up from his sex dreams — sex nightmares, really — with a painful phantom erection, his heart pounding hard, and his hand automatically reaching for his gun.

During his own private research, he has learned that sexual desire share the same kinds of neurological and hormonal networks as fear and fear from trauma. He has learned that a moderate level of norepinephrine in the brain builds sexual desire, but a high level of norepinephrine drives fear. He finds that he cannot really stop desire from becoming terror.

When he drives them back to his car, in the movie theater parking lot, he is eager to part ways for the rest of the night. He leaves the car running as he reaches to undo his seatbelt.

She places her hand over his — to stop him and to get his attention. His face goes to fire — and it goes numb. He looks up to see her smiling at him softly — and encouragingly. He thinks that if they had gotten close like this earlier — like, before what happened to him — maybe things would be different for them now. He also thinks that she’s so kind and sweet and funny and lovely, that it must be so apparent to the other men that she knows. He constantly wonders, why him? He constantly wonders if she has a fetish for the broken and the maimed because maybe she’s a overly empathetic freak of nature. He also wonders if this is all a terrible joke, if what she is doing is dismantling his defensive mechanisms to get him falling for her — before she utterly destroys him by telling him she was just messing around — it was all just a joke. Or a test.

She pats his hand. She asks, “Can we go out again? Sooner rather than later? Are you free next weekend?”

He stares back at her with his heart hammering in his chest — and he blurts, “I seriously do not understand why you like me.”

Her brows furrow a little bit. She says, “You’re kidding, right?”

He is obviously not.

And when he doesn’t say anything, she fills in the space. She says, “You’re wonderful.”

  
  


 

He currently doesn’t have it within him to be verbose or to be completely honest. He is too scared to ask her all of these questions he has in his mind — because he doesn’t trust himself to listen to the answers. He doesn’t know what it even means, that she thinks he is wonderful, because what she knows of him is so limited and contained. He is scared to ask her to clarify her opinion, because he’s scared that she will reveal that she actually doesn’t know him at all — that this entire night was just some glamor designed to make him feel hope.

He doesn’t know how to ask her if she remembers what the fuck is going on in his pants — even though the question is idiotic because of course she knows. She’s _seen it_. He mostly wants to know if she is repulsed by his body because he can’t even stand the sight of himself sometimes.   

He doesn’t know what she _wants from him_ because how does this _even end?_ Doesn’t it just end in heartbreak. Isn’t she predicting that, too?

“Um, I’m not tired,” she gently offers, breaking softly into his anxiety. “Do you want to grab a drink or coffee somewhere and keep talking?”

“No,” he says. And then he opts to end it at that, even though it sounds rude.

“No,” she repeats lightly. “Okay. I hear you. So we’ll say goodnight right now.” Her own heart is pounding a little bit. Every act of bravery from her actually doesn’t come from out of nowhere. It always feels like a risk, and it always costs her something. She still moistens her lips by drawing them momentarily in her mouth. She still asks, “Can I kiss you goodnight?”

And again — he hesitates. He responds with lengthy silence as his mind runs through all of the perils of doing such a thing.

She loses some of her nerve in the silence. She whispers, “It can be on the cheek. It doesn’t have to be — you know.”

And in response to that, he takes in a long breath. And then he sighs it out. He quietly says, “Okay.”

She says, “Okay?”

He repeats, “Yeah. Okay.”

“Oh, okay,” she says, as her pulse stutters in her neck, as her fingers and her lips tingle in anticipation.

She presses her fingertips to his face before she cups his cheek with her palm. She runs the pad of her thumb over his cheekbone as she quickly gets herself ready for this — she doesn’t want to make this bad or awkward for his sake.

She has to do all of the leaning — because he is not coming to her at all. She doesn’t really mind. She just presses forward — until her seatbelt stops her — and then she laughs self-consciously, to disperse some of the tension.

She reaches down to unclip and free herself.

And then she leans all the way forward with intention. She smears and presses her nose into his skin — he smells clean, but also a little bit onion-y from the tacos — and then she puckers up and lays her soft lips on his cheek.  

As she softly kisses his skin and hears him quietly release out a breath, she thinks that they’ve always had such nice chemistry like this. She thinks that this was the nicest date she’s been on — ever. She thinks that he’s so brave, and it’s so impressive.   

And as she starts to pull away, as her hand slides down his face to land on his shoulder and her mouth retreats so that her eyes can get better look at his expression — she feels him shift underneath her touch. The sensitive skin of her lips drag against his face, catching a little bit of stubble — as he turns his face, as her eyes widen in realization.

His mouth is wet. And soft. And gentle. And heartbreakingly careful.

She lets him kiss her with her eyes accidentally open. It is dark enough and he’s close enough that everything is fuzzy and obscured.

By the time she readies herself to deepen the kiss — he has already pulled away. She lets her hand fall from his shoulder as he puts space in between them.

They are both breathing a little heavily from holding in their breaths.

And then she starts smiling — laughing a little bit, actually. Because he’s just so fucking _cute_. She quickly closes the distance between their mouths again — giving him a quick and chaste peck on the lips for emphasis before pulling away again.

She tells him, “Sneaky sneaky.”

  
  


 

Missy arrives back home just a little bit past ten — she doesn’t even make it close to midnight — which prompts her dad to dryly make a joke about her being Cinderella and inquire about whether or not she has her shoes.

She is leaning against the wall in the foyer, clutching her wallet and car keys, as she toes off her sneakers. She is realizing, not at all for the first time in life, that this is where her sense of humor comes from — it’s from this old man. She says, “Daddy, you’re so corny sometimes.”

“I am not,” he says simply. “You’re home kind of early. How did it go? Badly? Did you both decide that you’d be better off just as colleagues?”

“Why do you sound so _hopeful?”_

He shrugs. “Life experience.”

She walks barefoot into the kitchen, opening the fridge door before hunting for a beer. She asks, “Do you want to watch a movie together and have a drink?” with her head still stuck in the fridge.  

“Baby, it’s too late for me to do that with you,” he says, from somewhere behind her. And then after a brief moment of quiet, as she grabs the neck of a brown bottle and lightly clicks it against other refrigerator objects as she pulls it out, her dad says, “Missandei — did what I just said bother you?”

She pulls a spoon out of the silverware drawer to pop the cap of the beer bottle off — a trick that her dad taught her actually — before she replaces the spoon and throws the bottle cap into the bag of recycling. She brings the open bottle to her mouth as she shrugs — as she takes a slow sip.

She licks the littlest bit of froth off her top lip as she admits, “A little bit, but I get it.”

“He honestly seems like a nice kid. I don’t have anything against who he is as a person or what he does for a living. I’ve just known guys like that. And I also know that it’s tempting and alluring — to be with someone who understands the job and what you’re going through, day in and day out.”

She shrugs again — as she nods. She says, “Yeah, it is.”

“You know, sometimes I wished your mom was able to relate to me, on that level,” he continues.

“Yeah?”

“But you know I love your mom.”

He is still so prone to referring to her mother in the present tense — especially how he feels about her mother.

She rapidly blinks back her emotional response to that, as she takes a bigger, more bracing sip of her beer.

“She was the one who kept it consistent and stable for you kids.”

“Ah,” Missandei says. “I get it now. That’s what you’re worried about. You want me to find someone like Mom. You don’t want me to be with someone like you.”

 _“You’re_ like me,” he corrects, thinking that she is misunderstanding his point a little bit. “And I couldn’t have survived without your mom. I don’t think I’d still be here — if it weren’t for your mom taking care of me.”

  
  


 

These sorts of conversations are rare and thus awkward for them. She has barely ever faced any sort of disapproval from her dad — from her mom, yes. A whole shit ton. But that was because her mom was around the most and her mom was the disciplinarian. Her dad was her buddy who played with her, taught her how to take care of herself against all of the brutal potential dangers out there — and he was the one who believed that she could do little wrong because she was his perfect little girl.

He is still prone to believing that she needs someone to take care of her — not because she is a woman or his daughter — not completely — but mostly because he knows that her job is very hard. He also knows that he will not live forever. He will die one day, too. And he would feel better about it if there was someone taking over for him, who can make her life easier by loving her and supporting her in the way that she needs. Her dad knows that someone in the same line of work is not going to be able to be that person for her.

Missandei is having a hard time maintaining enough of her bearings to come up with reasons why she and her dad actually aren’t the same at all. She feels unease with her dad’s perspective, but she doesn’t know enough about her feelings currently to pinpoint why his words are so unsettling. She just knows that she likes Grey so much. She just knows that the thought of being with someone who is not like Grey, who is like engineer Paul, just fills her with so much fucking despair. She already knows that Grey is never going to be the type of person who will enjoy the mundanity of normalcy.

“Okay, so I’m going to bed now,” her dad says. “I’m sorry I brought this shit up. I realize that you just went on a fucking _first_ date with the guy. How was it, by the way? Did you have a good time?”

She clears her throat, swirling her bottle of beer around in her head. She says, “Yeah, I had a really nice time.”

“That’s good, baby,” he says. “I’m glad you’re starting to date again. Your mom would be thrilled.”

  
  


 

He spits out the hot coffee that she gives him in shock — garnering all of these surprised looks from their colleagues all around office. He mutters sorry abstractly to the room, as he plucks up tissues from the box on Brienne’s desk and starts wiping down his own computer monitor and the now-speckled manila folders on his own desk.

“Now that is what I’d call a severe overreaction,” she tells him, hiking her hip up to situate herself on the corner of his desk. She is smirking at him.

“I was expecting more of your trash coffee,” he explains — needlessly.

“I paid good money for that gross coffee, you know. I had to wait like, _forever,_ for them to make it, too.”

  
  


 

He was kind of irrationally afraid that she’d start grabbing his ass at work and calling him sweetheart in front of all of their colleagues — thereby torpedoing both of their fucking careers into the core of the Earth, but actually — she largely acts normal around him.

Her brand of normal still involves constant, awkward come-ons. She still says weird things to him about how she had a dream about him — not a sexy one, calm down — but one where they were running from the fuzz, not at all realizing that they are, in fact, the fuzz. The dream was kind of existentialist?

In response to her pointless rambling, as he in the midst of checking over his gun, he tells her that she seriously needs to stop sexually harassing him at work. He tells her, “If I were a woman, your behavior would be called predatory instead of what it currently is — which is amusing.”

Something flips in her at that — whether it’s something in his tone or something in the way he is articulating his point — or maybe her response is a little bit unrelated to him.

But she gets rather harsh and serious about it. She crosses her arms and she stares him down. She says, “Oh, so because I’m a woman, my brand of sexual harassment is not threatening at all because I’m _too weak_ to actually ever hurt you? No _shit,_ man. And no — I’m not a dude, so _yes_ , I get away with it. No, it’s not a double standard. It is a cold, hard fact of _life.”_

In both of their ears — because Daario is listening in — they hear Daario say, “Whoa. Goddamn, Missy.”

“Chill, man,” she mutters, checking her own gun. “I’m not being hysterical right now. I’m just trying to get ready to do my job.” Then she reaches down in between her legs and tucks her gun in the holster around her thigh.

She says, “Sometimes I think about how crazy it is to have a loaded weapon so close to my vagina — but then I’m like, oh, blah blah blah insert dick joke here about how penises are like loaded weapons _men are powerful!_ Ha-ha.”

“Oh my God,” Daario says in their ear. “Is she losing her mind right now?”

“Wow, more casual sexism,” she says, voice low. “And you think that my casual appreciation of Grey’s bouncy tushy is the systemic problem here? _Okay.”_

“Seriously, is she drunk?”   

  
  


 

He assumes that she is kind of pissed at him — for _what_ he does not even _know —_ so he gives her a little bit of space and assumes that their next date is off — that their personal shit is just cancelled forever then.

But she surprises him by texting him the day before their next outing, to cheerfully remind him that she’s going to pick him up at 9 a.m. sharp.

  
  


 

Missandei spends the entire first half of the baseball game just cowering behind her arms, sometimes into his shoulder. They are sitting behind third base and so a lot of balls get shot right in their general direction — but nowhere actually near them except for one time, when he _almost_ gets a chance to catch a fly ball.

She pretty much keeps her eyes mostly shut, so she doesn’t have to watch what is going on anymore. She mostly just spends the game whimpering and making silly commentary about how horrible and slow and boring and _dangerous_ this game is. She sees a batter break a bat into shards of wood shrapnel because he hits the ball so hard, and she is like, “What the fuck? Are we going to be _okay?”_

Grey pats her on the knee — and he generally finds watching baseball with her to be like — _the fucking worst._ He is not having a good time at all either. He says, “Miss, if you hate this so much, why are we even doing this?”

“So I didn’t know I hated it when I bought the tickets,” she explains, covering her face and watching the game through a gap in her fingers. “I’ve only watched my nephews play on their little league teams. And they suck, and they don’t hit balls with the same kind of life-ending force, okay? And I know you like this boring, terrible sort of stuff — and I wanted to do something with you that you’d potentially enjoy because I care about you, okay? Sue me! Why don’t you freaking plan a date and see how easy it is!”

  
  


 

He is mollified a little bit, after her ticked-off tirade. He gives her some money and asks her if she’d like to go buy beer and snacks from concessions — to get a break from “the life-ending force of balls flying in her general direction.”

He half expects her to be all insulted that he is giving her money and a task to do — but actually, she snatches the bills out of his hands and mutters, “Oh, shit yeah, don’t have to tell me twice. Be right back!”

She comes back after spending _all of his money —_ and he gave her way more than she needed. She comes back with a smile — and with a paper tray of four exorbitantly priced light beers, nachos, and two hot dogs.  

She is only a few bites into her hot dog when her phone buzzes in her pocket and she checks it.

Then she says to him, “Shit. Grey. I have to go.”

“Oh,” he says, as he automatically starts pulling food and beer off of her lap. “Yeah, of course.”

“We drove here together,” she says, cramming the rest of her hot dog into her mouth.

“Take the car,” he smoothly says. “No big deal. I’ll figure out how to get home.”

“Okay,” she says through her muffled mouth. “Thank you.”

“Stay safe,” he tells her in goodbye, slowly tilting his face to offer her his cheek.

She turns his face the rest of the way with her hand. She kisses him full on the lips — as she holds half-masticated hot dog and bun in her cheeks.

The kiss is brief and tastes like ketchup, onions, and meat juice. She still thinks that it is fucking  _awesome_. 

She continues chewing and swallowing, as she also quietly tells him, “I’ll call you later.”

  
  


 

When she arrives at the same coffee shop — the employees have become somewhat acclimated to their presence — Yiantha is standing outside of it. There is a light sprinkle of rain and wind blowing against Yiantha’s swollen, tear-streaked face.

Missandei says, “You went back to him,” as a statement, not a question.  

  
  


 


	27. Missy expresses her wants and desires

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy has a terrible fight in public with a person she is using for information. Grey gets propositioned, again, by the future love of his life. He generally responds like how he normally responds, with a lot of fear and bewilderment — and then bravery. He is way too hard on himself sometimes. And then they can't catch a break because the next day, they get called into work on their day off.

  
  
  
  


 

She spots Yiantha’s alarming weight loss, her dry hair, her jittery hands, and the pervasive lack of eye contact — and that is mostly what Missy focuses on as Yiantha cups her barely protruding belly and tells Missandei that she just went to the doctor and got an ultrasound — and the baby is doing _great._

Yiantha digs in her stained purse for a few seconds, rustling around in the disorganization before she pulls out a folded piece of paper — an ultrasound — and hands it over to Missandei, who silently takes it and barely looks at it. Because she knows that Yiantha is _lying._

  
  
  
  


 

Warming her hands around a cup of cocoa, because — she says — caffeine is bad for the baby — Yiantha continues on with her precarious and brittle show. She tells Missandei that she’s been going to the center and making her meetings with her program manager. She’s been staying at the shelter. She’s been taking her prenatal vitamins so that the baby will grow strong.

For many years now, Missandei has sat at a dinner table and has listened to her brothers crack these dark jokes about the stupid and transparent lies that junkies tell. She has made many family dinners awkward because she got uppity and told them that the people that they are around are actually suffering, and that they should lead with empathy — the sake of being models for their kids.

In turn, her brothers found her wild condescension maddening and really insulting, so they mostly told her she doesn’t know what she’s talking about — having lived a cush life in a cush neighborhood with cush parents who sent her off to a cush university. They actually just straight up told her she lives in la-la land and is straight up annoying.

Those kinds conversations all took place before her job change.  

“You need more money,” Missy concludes, after listening to Yiantha ramble on about the high cost of good nutrition and school supplies for her courses.

“I normally wouldn’t even think of asking,” Yiantha says quickly. “But it’s for the baby.”

  
  
  
  


 

Yiantha pushes straight, constant denial at Missandei, when Missandei mentions her health, her appearance, her emotional state — the fact that she was crying when Missandei walked up. Missandei points out that the sonogram she was given looks like it was printed off of the internet — that the baby looks entirely too far long for this to actually be real.

Yiantha is now a shell of her former self — no longer the righteous and self-affirming young woman who proclaimed that she went into her line of work with both eyes opened. Yiantha ignores all of Missy’s statements and instead, just persists. She tells Missandei that she is trying to create a better life for herself and her baby.

Which makes Missy impulsively snap — because this is her first time going through something like this and she’s doing it based on pure instinct — possibly because she is realizing what Grey has been telling her — that Yiantha is no longer a valuable source of information, that the well has dried up a while ago.

Missandei coldly says, “You’re killing yourself. And you’re killing the baby — if it isn’t already dead already. Is that _what you want?”_

  
  
  
  


 

They are asked to leave the coffee shop by the manager once Yiantha becomes distraught and becomes a loud distraction, after Missandei tells her that she will not give her any more money. Yiantha kind of flips on the spot and starts to cry — and she starts to viciously accuse.

Missy is trying to field a conversation with the manager as she simultaneously tries to shush Yiantha for a moment. The manager is telling them that they have to leave right away — or else the police will be called. Missandei is trying to tell them _not_ to do that, because that’s really the fucking last thing she needs.

She stands up and tries to guide Yiantha to her feet with a hand on the elbow.

Which Yiantha snatches away. She then hatefully calls Missandei a manipulative lying bitch. She tells Missandei that she’s just like the rest of them — but worse actually, far worse. Missandei is worse because she purports to be a friend — she purports to be one of them — but she’s actually just a user and a taker like all of them. She tells Missandei that they may come from the same place and they may speak the same language, but they are _not_ the same at all. She’s not a fucking liar and a traitor like Missandei is. She tells Missandei that she knows all Missandei ever wanted from her was for her to risk her life and her baby’s life, just for Missandei’s job. Missandei is not a good Naathi girl. Missandei is actually just like the rest of _them —_ the assholes in control of thei city and the country.

Yiantha says, “You don’t care about me! You’re _not_ my friend!”

Missy spots various people in the cafe holding up their phones, recording Yiantha’s meltdown. And she is in _disbelief_ at how fucking terrible people are. She pulls out her identification from her back pocket and flashes it at people. No one cares. They actually try to zoom in on her ID. Stressed out and clearly losing control of the situation, she says, “Sirs, ma’ams, please stop recording this.”

A few people start putting away their phones — until a white guy in business casual actually stands up and tells her, “You can’t make us do that. It’s not illegal to record you. It’s our right.”

Okay, that is true. But _fuck him._

  
  
  
  


 

The local PD _does_ get called and she and Yiantha get taken outside. Yiantha gets puts into cuffs while she calms down — something Missandei repeatedly asked them _not to do_ — and Missandei _does_ have to have an entire conversation with a condescending asshole who lectures her on how she should try not to disturb the peace. The officer is not at all impressed with her credentials — he is actually ticked off by it. And they are clearly not going to see eye-to-eye on this, so Missandei just tries to fucking _end_ the conversation with the jackass by saying, “Yeah yeah,” to whatever dumb shit he is saying to her.

She pleads with them not to arrest Yiantha.

The other officer uncuffs Yiantha, as the asshole one tells her that she is lucky today. They just don’t feel like doing the paperwork for some drugged out hooker and her fucking green-ass handler.

  
  
  
  


 

She wants to know how Yiantha is going to get back to her sister’s house — because she is assuming that Yiantha will go to her sister’s house. But Yiantha just glares hatefully at Missy and tells her not to fucking worry about it anymore. Yiantha just walks off, down the street, leaving Missy to stare at her retreating back with her hands pressed on the top of her head.

  
  
  
  


 

He’s not even home half an hour — before his phone buzzes in his hand with a text from her. She wants to know where he is at.

He tells her he’s back at home. He tells her that the rest of the game was pretty enjoyable — because she wasn’t around yammering in his ear the whole time.

It’s clearly a teasing joke, but she responds to it way weird. She actually ignores it. Her text comes across perfunctory and blunt, as she responds by asking him if she can come over to his apartment —  “again.”

  
  
  
  


 

After he opens the door a crack, she pushes it fully open and walks into his home. She throws her wallet onto his coffee table before she turns around to face him. And then with surprising calmness, she says to him, “I want to have sex again. Do you?”

He is stunned. He is like, _what the fuck?_ He is pretty sure she has lost her damn mind. He looks at her with his eyes bugged out. He says, “Like, right now?”

“Yeah, man,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest. “Do you wanna? Are you busy with something else?”

He responds to _that_ with, “Uhhh.”

She says, “Grey, _relax._ Unclench, dude. Take the time to think it through.”  And then slower and with more enunciation, she repeats, “Do you want to have sex with me — right now?”

  
  
  
  


 

So he does take her advice and he does think it through. He weighs his options, and he thinks that he has been really worried about this, so it makes great sense to just jump head-in first again and see what happens _what the fuck?_

Finally, after long seconds of silence, he tamely says, “You seem . . . in a mood. Did something happen?”

He half expects her to blow up at him over something he doesn’t understand — again — but actually, she just sighs.

“Grey, many things have happened,” she says, not altogether patiently. “And I don’t really need to listen to you tell me what you think is best for me. I don’t really need to hear a lecture on what mood I should be in, in order to have sex. I’m an adult. And that is insulting.”

“Oh, okay,” he says, setting his jaw now. So that’s how it’s gonna be. “Well, in that case, the answer is no thanks. I’m good on the sex.”

  
  
  
  


 

She is numb inside and actually taking yet _another_ rejection from him rather well, all things considered.

She walks back to his coffee table to swipe up her wallet. She holds it in her hand and says, “Wonderful,” sarcastically. She says, “I’m glad I came over for this. I’m glad that it’s all gravy for you to booty call me after you have a fight with your parents, but I can’t do the same with you, after I have a fight with my sex worker friend. I’ll be going now.”

  

  
  
  


 

So he tries something new and weird for him — he tries to get her to talk to him about what she is feeling and what happened to set her on this trajectory.

She pretty much can’t believe this is happening — that he is trying to talk to her at a rare time when she is not at all in the mood to talk.  This is why she generally resists.

She resists by being petty and by throwing all of these things in his face. She tells him that it’s really rich that he is trying to get her to be honest with him about her current feelings, because he happens to be _fucking terrible_ at that. She tells him that she really doesn’t feel like talking and having a cathartic heart-to-heart about stuff. She literally feels like _fucking._ Like, that is the sole reason she came over. She tells him that, short of explicitly telling him she is coming over to fuck and only to fuck, she feels that her text message to him was pretty clear. She tells him that while he is allowed to change his mind, it is annoying because it took like, thirty-five minutes to get to his apartment because there was traffic. She has to go sit in traffic for another twenty minutes now. That is annoying. She wishes he would’ve just spared her all of the driving, on the phone, by simply saying, _no Missandei, don’t come over. I don’t want it._

She tells him it’s annoying that she has to go with her plan B now.

In response to _all of that_ , he tightly says, “So you’re just going to meet up with some other guy then?”

She looks at him like she is simultaneously impressed and also under-impressed with him. She says, “No, man. I’m not going off to meet _some other guy._ Because I’m dating _you,_ and I am actually _not_ an asshole? Plan B is going home, changing my clothes, and hitting the gym. Because I can’t really masturbate unless it’s really late at night or I’m in the shower. Because I live with _my father,_ and he’s a real boner killer.”

  
  
  
  


 

He grabs her arm as she makes a move to leave — and then he immediately drops it once he realizes what he is doing. He holds his hands up, and he says, “Sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to grab you. I just want to talk about this some more. Don’t go yet.”

She sighs. “Grey,” she says. “I told you. Repeatedly. I don’t feel like talking right now. You, of all people, should honestly be better about respecting that.”

So he makes the impulsive decision to take a step forward and kiss her, right then.

  
  
  
  


 

She tries to keep their sloppy mouths touching as she drags him backwards into his bedroom — and she remembers where it is with stark clarity — as her busy hands start tugging and pulling at their clothes.

Like the first time, it just goes really fast. They are just mashing their faces together and shoving their tongues into each other mouths as their hands start clawing and blindly, frantically exploring.

He hisses as she pulls apart the button of his jeans and takes down the zipper — he gasps as she shoves her hand down his pants and cups him right over his injury.

He grabs her wrist then. He holds her delicate bones tightly. And then he extracts her touch from his boxers. He tells her, “Don’t touch me like that.”

“Like what?” she asks, falling backwards on his bed, with her hands going to her own jeans. “Like, with neediness?”

“Without me saying you can.”

“Oh damn,” she mutters, shoving her jeans down over her hips. “Bossy.”

She licks her lips.

Then she asks, “Do you want me to take my pants off? _Can_ I take my pants off?”

“Yeah,” he says, as his heart starts to ram hard against his ribcage, as he fights to keep his breathing even. “Take them off.”

She kicks her jeans off the rest of the way. Her faded cotton panties used to be blue, but they are kind of off-white from repeated washings. She just didn’t expect that she’d be showing off her underwear to him when she got dressed in the morning. After all, today was only their second date.

She says, “Do you want me to take my panties off?”

He is thinking, _what the fuck,_ this shit escalated really quickly and got all sexy without much of his conscious input.

He says, “No, I’ll take them off.”

He climbs on the bed and he’s got his hands clenched around the edges of her underwear, stretching the material a little, the sight of that making her groan. He is tugging her underwear down her ass as she reaches out and softly runs her fingers and hand over his face and lips — as her eyes soften and kind of get shiny and wet as she stares at him.

Inspired by that — and also by how he feels inside upon seeing that — he tells her, “I told you not to touch me.”

She freezes. Then she drops her hand from his face. She says, “I honestly thought you meant the sexy hand-to-genitals kind of touching. I didn’t realize you meant all touching.”

“I meant all touching,” he says.

“Oh, damn,” she sighs out, lying back a little bit more. “Well, you’re lucky I am finding that hot. Congratulations. Goddammit.”  

He pulls her underwear to her knees, as he also tries not to look directly at the new exposed parts of her body — that feels like it’s too much — like, it’s really personal. He just refocuses on her knees and watches her pull them up so that it’s easier for him to drag her underwear the rest of the way off, off of her feet.

And once she is freed, she unconsciously or maybe even consciously spreads her legs a little bit — and he just looks down.

That’s definitely a vagina. That’s her vagina. It’s nice. Awesome. What the fuck.

And then he says, “What the fuck, Missandei?”

“Um, I sincerely hope you mean ‘What the fuck, I want to do sex stuff to you’ — and not like, ‘What the fuck, your vagina looks so weird.’”

“It’s the latter.”

“What!”

And then her shock devolves into a gasp and a moan, as he reaches in between her legs to part and then touch her.  

  
  
  
  


 

It’s been a _while_ since she has been touched like this — by someone who isn’t herself. It’s been _a while_ since she’s been on the receiving end of something like this — and she likes him a lot — like, a lot _a lot_ , so getting felt up by him is like — it is like, really nuts and really interesting, powerful stuff.

She starts groaning and panting as he inserts a finger and lightly strokes her — and she is responding more to the emotional newness of this more than the actual tactile feel of it.

She keeps losing her mind and losing track of their game, as her hands instinctively reach out and tries to grab him, to pull him closer to kiss — because she is definitely that kind of woman.

He keeps pausing to slap her hands away and to remind her that she’s not supposed to touch him. She huffs out her frustration at that, burying her face in the pillow and twisting her hips with the motion. He tells her, “Stop moving.”

There are so many rules. He just fucking loves rules so much. He loves rules so much that he has a bunch of rules in bed because of course he does. What the hell?

She tries to tell him so — that he is so consistent in his love of fucking rules.

It actually comes out of her mouth like, “Dude, you are so fucking hot right now. What is even this _mess?_ Are we about to have sex? We are, right? Like, that is where all this kinky foreplay is leading right? Like, Grey, can we get on the _same page?_ Like, are you gonna take off your clothes soon? Like, _get naked,_ dude!”

She reaches for him again — she grabs his shirt and tries to pull at it.

He starts fighting her. He starts prying her hands off of his body. He says, “Oh my God, stop moving. Stop trying to touch me. Stop trying to _control this.”_

“Why don’t you make me?”

  
  
  
  


 

So he gets out of bed to go pull out some rope from his closet, from out of his backpacking gear. When she sees the blue rope, it makes her look at him a certain way — like she is impressed but also a little wary and skeptical.

He tells her not to look at him like that. It’s not that fucking weird to have rope in the closet. It’s so it’s easy for him to choke women out in his bedroom before he kills them.

“Ha-ha, your jokes are funny and not at all terrifying right now,” she says to him, swishing her legs in his sheets and raising her arms above her head.

  
  
  
  


 

So he ties her hands together and also connects them tightly to his slatted headboard, as his mind is screaming out: _What the fuck are you doing, besides having a fucking psychotic break, you fucking psycho!_

As he mentally just flinches over his own takedown of himself, she tests out the knot. It doesn’t budge.

She says, “Wow, you are great at knots! I should’ve known. I mean, I saw what you did on Daario’s boat. I don’t mean like — how you pranced around half naked the entire day. I meant how you were good at buoys and casting off. Is that boat terminology right? Oh my God, what am I even saying right now? Grey, we’re about to have sex again!”

“Seriously, Miss,” he says. “Can you be a little quieter?”

“Um . . .”

  
  
  
  


 

After he tightens the compression bandage around her face, against her mouth — the ones he sometimes uses for his calves whenever he is close to getting shin splints — he is looking down at this woman that he has gagged and tied to his bed.

And he is thinking that this shit has _completely_ gotten really out of hand — it has completely gone off the fucking _rails_ and he definitely should be in fucking _more_ therapy than he currently _is._ He needs to fucking get comfortable talking about this shit because clearly he is _insane_ and a fucking ticking time bomb. Hitting a colleague at work? Getting arrested for public intoxication? Getting head-butted by a sex worker? Getting disowned by the only people who have ever truly loved him? Tying the same colleague to his fucking bed — _naked?_

He just feels fucking terrible and like he is a bad person. He’s about to untie her and apologize to her for the weird turn that sex took — but she pulls up her knees again. She spreads her legs again — like by a lot. Like, more than looks decent. Like, he can see _a lot_.

And it makes him feel this phantom pain and this phantom ache all over again.  

  
  
  
  


 

She starts automatically and instinctively ripping her wrists against the constraining rope, as he shoves one of his pillows underneath her hips, as he kneels and situates himself in between her legs, as he looks down and spreads her with fingers — before he lowers his mouth onto her without warning.

His bed rattles as she yanks at the knot holding her to his headboard, as she basically screams into the bandage wrapped around her mouth, as she arches her body, as he reaches up to palm her breast, as he starts giving her really great head.

  
  
  
  


 

She cries as she finishes — as he sucks her clit through the bone-melting orgasm — drawing it out and forcing her body to jerk uncontrollably. She cries as she holds his head tightly in between her thighs and tries ride out the wave without losing herself too much in it.

She’s sweating and exhausted afterward — and sore in multiple places — as he gently and quietly and shamefully starts undoing the knot at her wrist. And then the knot behind her head.

Saliva has soaked into the bandage, and her first words to him after all of that is, “Grey! That was really nice! Thank you!”

  
  
  
  


 

Once again, because he is really bad with women and a major sexually deviant psycho, he starts trying to usher her out the door, right after sex. He starts avoiding eye contact at all costs and he starts tossing articles of her clothing at her, like her underwear and her pants.

She is sitting up in his bed, with her hair all mussed up and her wrists all welted and red. She is smiling at him so hard, as she tells him, “Grey, take in some deep breaths. It’s okay. It’s _okay._ That was really fun! I would do that again!”  

“Hey, so I need some alone time,” he tells her. He also sighs. He says, “You got the sex you wanted. So . . . I mean, if there’s nothing else?”

“Grey,” she says solemnly. “Don’t make yourself sound like a prostitute.”

  
  
  
  


 

She leaves because she knows he really needs her to. She still squeezes his hand at his front door though. She still wraps her arms around his shoulders in a tight hug. She still kisses his neck and whispers, “Thank you,” to him.

  
  
  
  


 

They end up seeing each other again sooner rather than later — the next day actually.

The two of them and Drogo get a call from the over the line on their Sunday. She has to leave a family barbeque at Mossador’s house, to the grumbles of all of her adult female extended family members. Her aunts still think she will never land a nice young man. Her cousins who are pharmacists and accountants think that her job doesn’t pay her enough and that her life is lonely and sad. She takes a brisket sandwich for the road, because joke’s on all of them. She got laid real hard just the other day. So she is doing just fine.

On her way to the crime scene, over speakerphone, Drogo tells them what happened, according to the call that was placed to the local PD. There is a hum of human activity in the back of the call. He explains and tells them he’s at his mom’s house.

It’s actually her very first time at this kind of crime scene. She expected the sight, but she didn’t expect the smell. The sandwich she ate rolls in her stomach, as the officer on the scene fills her and Grey in on the details.

The massage parlor has been emptied out and coned off. The carpeted floor is stinky and sticky with congealed blood. They are told that she has been dead since at least 2 a.m.  

As Missandei stares into the face of a dead woman, Grey lowers his voice and quietly asks, “Are you okay?” He is trying to ask if she is traumatized seeing this. He knows this is her first time.

She says, “Yeah.”

  
  


 

 


	28. Grey, Missy, and Drogo visit a crime scene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey continues being shit at handling his feelings, so he just acts standoffish with the future love of his life. The future love of his life puts up with his shenanigans and also generally just tries to do her job well even though sometimes it's hard to know what to do. Drogo figures something out because he is also just really great at what he does. Missy goes to jail. And then has tea with her pops.

  
  
  
  
  


The cops start automatically making fun of Drogo when he gets there — in flip flops and a rainbow tank top — and tries to be all business. Drogo nods at Grey and Missy before his grim face takes in the crime scene and he starts asking about access to evidence logs and to get the paperwork started on inter-agency information sharing and collaboration.

The de facto lead cop — the homicide sergeant — responds with, “Bro, you cranky ‘cause you gonna be late for a Tiesto concert or something? I like your shorts.”

“Shut up, Kovarro.”

  
  
  
  


Grey typically would start teaching her or going over standard operating procedures again — more of a reminder because she actually knows procedure really well because she keeps reading their procedures over and over, obsessively memorizing, based on his direction — but today, once cleared to by the PD’s homicide sergeant, he just takes out his work phone and starts recording as he interviews the first officer on the scene. His internal logic is that they need to get a move on, to get in and get out fast to stay out of the way, and also she doesn’t benefit from constant hand-holding and coddling.

He does ominously tell her, “Spare no detail,” before he leaves her, which she takes to mean that he is definitely going to chew her ass out a lot later if she messes this up or if she forgets to dot an i. She briefly thinks to herself that this is _probably_ why it’s a bad idea to have sex with a coworker.

She starts identifying possible sources of scene contamination as well as the location of evidentiary items that may later be lost or contaminated in the investigative process. She takes pictures of everything, records video, sketches things out in her notebook with measurements, and makes notes as quickly and as accurately as possible.

She tries to keep on task and not think too much about it — as she takes pictures of the pools of blood and the mess in the main office. Even though she is not an expert, she can guess that the killing of Auntie, the parlor owner, was violent and also maybe not very calculated.

When the medical examiner arrives on the scene, she tells them what they already know. She smiles at Drogo — at Drogo’s outfit really — as she tells them, “Cause of death likely from multiple sharp force injuries.”

“Stabbed and bled to death,” Drogo summarizes.

“Yes.”

  
  
  


Drogo feels kind of bad that he called them in to work on their day off, while Missandei was with her family and while Grey was . . . doing whatever it is that Grey does on his days off. So Drogo orders them lunch even though none of them are hungry at all. He orders paper boxes of noodles and fried meat doused in gravy.

Back on campus, in the office, Grey immediately starts logging and tagging the dozens and dozens of crime scene photos into the database, his interview with the first officer, and also goes over Missandei’s notes and recordings.

“You forgot to record the existing weather and lighting conditions.”

“Oh,” she says, blinking a little bit. “Oh, so it was sunny —”

“Don’t _tell me,”_ he cuts in. “Write it down.”

“Sorry about the mistake,” she says, getting up from her seat, just to go to her notes that are sitting right in front of him, just to jot down the information that he himself knows and can log without her further contributions. She understands why this is a sticking point for him, though. This is _definitely_ why people are told not to have sex with their coworkers.

  
  
  
  


While Grey takes a quick toilet break, Drogo spins to her in his office chair and, point blank, asks her, “Did you two have a fight? What about?”

In response to this, Missy says, “Seriously, Drogo. Do you regret putting a deposit down for the Fyre Festival, or what?”

“Oh, you got jokes now?” Drogo throws back. “And that doesn’t even make sense. You don’t put down a deposit. You just buy the ticket, man.”

  
  
  
  


It’s another two hours at the office before they are done. By that point, the barbecue at her brother’s house has dwindled down — Moss has already driven their dad back to her place — and Drogo reports that his niece’s unicorn-theme birthday party isn’t really shit he is in a hurry to get back to.

So he says, “What you guys got going on for the rest of the day? You wanna see a flick? There’s that new Dwayne Johnson movie out.”

Missandei says, “I’ve already seen it.”

Right at the same time as Grey says, “I’d watch that.”

The nature of their responses — how they were said in unison and so blandly gives Drogo pause. He stares at the both of them for a few seconds, his eyes flicking back and forth between their faces.

And then he calmly says, “You two are sleeping together.”

Grey says nothing in response do that — he just raises a brow — and that makes Drogo start to doubt his assessment, just a little bit.

But then Missandei’s face falls. She says, “How —” before she realizes her mistake and then clamps her mouth shut again.

Drogo realizes that he is actually completely right.

Grey then says, “Fuck. _Missandei.”_

She shuts her eyes. In shame. Because she is _the worst._

  
  
  
  


Drogo makes quick work of this. He sighs and crosses his arms over his chest. He wearily tells them that he really doesn’t want to police their personal lives because it’s none of his business what they fucking do in their personal lives — but the organization has a non-fraternization policy, and they are all in deep shit if this becomes a thing. Drogo will get reprimanded for knowing and not reporting it up. Grey and Missandei will get reprimanded and then separated, for not reporting it up.  

At this millionth reminder over how her job is in jeopardy just because she is spending _more time_ with someone she fucking _cares about_ because it makes her _happy,_ Missandei says, “I really don’t understand why it’s the organization’s fucking business — who I’m sleeping with. It does not affect how I perform my work.” She gestures to Grey. “It _definitely_ does not affect how he performs his work. He is a freaking _robot._ Come on. This is bullshit.”  

And then her eyes get watery and her voice wavers a little bit, as she exhales and says, “So we’re supposed to break up? In order to keep our jobs? It’s _not fair.”_

Beside her, Grey releases a quiet sigh.

With his hands clasped together on top of his head, Drogo also sighs — but louder and with a lot of resignation. He says, “Oh, great. So you really like each other and this is a real relationship and not just a convenient sex thing. Fucking _wonderful.”_

  
  
  
  


Drogo isn't Grey, so he doesn’t feel right hitting a woman, so instead, he randomly and viciously shoots his hand out and smacks Grey in the shoulder hard with it. Grey recoils in surprise and looks at Drogo with such anger — before Drogo urgently says, “You fucking say _nothing_ about this _ever,_ okay!”

He turns to Missandei. And then, yelling at her, he says, “And for the _thousandth time_ — you fucking need to get _your fucking face_ under control!”

To the both of them, Drogo says, “I’d fucking start shopping around for potential new jobs, if I were you guys, you fucking _morons.”_

And then after another short pause, he adds, “You _better_ get like, _fucking married_ at the end of this, and I better get to make a speech at your _fucking wedding_ — because I’m putting my ass on the line for _this shit.”_

  
  
  
  


Drogo makes the decision to cover for them — because Grey has been through so _fucking much_ and has lost _so fucking much_ because of this job, and he thinks that Grey deserves just a little bit of peace and happiness for all of his sacrifices. If Missandei is the person that makes Grey happy — then that’s fine. Drogo can help maintain that for the time being.

Drogo also makes the decision to cover for them because he feels he owes it to Grey, after reporting Grey to internal affairs.

Grey generally understands why Drogo has decided to cover for them, and he can’t really handle the meaning of it or the gesture of it in a healthy way, so he just shuts down inside and just fills the void with more feelings of unworthiness and self-loathing. He hates that he is putting Drogo in this spot. He hates that this has become such a fucking big deal. He hates that he is so fucking weak and pathetic. He hates that he is causing people so much trouble.

He can’t even say thank you to Drogo. It would just feel empty and insulting.

Missandei, in contrast, jumps on Drogo and throws her arms around him. He is a lot taller than she is, so she is hanging off of him. He has to press his hand to her shoulder blades, to keep her from sliding off. He has to begrudgingly sigh before he returns the hug, as she shoves out her gratitude.

She is saying, “Thank you, Drogo! Oh my God, thank you _so much._ Drogo, you don’t even know what _this means._ We won’t make you regret it! Drogo! You are the best! Oh my gosh!”

  
  
  
  


To reward Drogo for being amazing, Missandei makes the both of them watch Dwayne Johnson’s new movie — again — with Drogo. Drogo is actually pretty alright on it — he has decided that he really doesn’t need to spend personal time with the both of them that much — but she insists. She buys all of their tickets on her phone, and she cheerfully tells Drogo that it’s actually good to watch this again because Grey actually didn’t see the entire thing the first go-round.

At the theater, she asks Grey, “Grey! Do you wanna go pee before the movie starts?”

  
  
  
  


After spending a few days being a real dick to her and recoiling every time she even gets somewhat close to him, he finally gets a chance to tell a mental health professional about how he is a real piece of shit who demeaned a really amazing woman during sex because he is, for sure, a sexual deviant. Like, surprise! Now he fucking knows this about himself.

Grey tells Sam this because of a promise that Sam made to him — Sam promised that he would report Grey and protect Missandei from Grey, if Sam detected that Grey was being abusive or coercive or overly manipulative. He is telling Sam what happened even though he would honestly rather have fucking dental surgery than talk about sex, because he wants to ensure that Sam has all the facts so that Sam can do the right thing and have him fired or committed or put into some sort of rehab for sexual deviants — if it’s the time for that.

Upon Grey’s pronouncement, Sam is actually really worried and slightly alarmed. His pulse quickens, and he straightens in his seat. He asks, “Grey, what happened?”

It is terrible to recount because, it turns out, that he is not at all good at talking about sex. It’s not surprising at all. But the fact fills him with anger anyway. He feels really put on the spot and really expose, as he stutters and as he fights for terminology and euphemism, as he hates himself as he relives what happened — and he spends a slow ten minutes just trying to give Sam a general outline of what happened with her.  

Sam visibly relaxes after the recounting. He actually lets out a short, relieved laugh.

He also says, “You’re not a sexual deviant, Grey!” He laughs again. He says, “Wow, you had me going for a second there. I was so nervous! You got me! I have to admit, you got me today!”

“Doc,” Grey says, looking back at Sam, just fucking miserable.

Sam eases back into smooth calmness after that. And then he easily recaps back to Grey, what Grey just explained to him. Sam says, “Grey, you had consensual sex with your sex partner and did some sex play involving bondage. That is not paraphilial psychopathology. That is normative adult human sexual behavior.”

Grey is shaking his head. He is shaking his head _a lot_ because he does _not_ agree with this assessment. He _knows_ that something fucking weird and _fucked up_ is going on in his head. He _knows_ that something has changed in him. He blurts out, “But I’ve never done that before. I never did that sort of thing during sex _before_ what happened to me.”

This is the first time ever — that Grey has willingly brought up what happened to him, in a non-joking manner, without prompting from Sam.

“You think the two things are related,” Sam says.

“They _have to be,”_ Grey says. “People just don’t wake up one day and just start doing _the shit that I have been doing._ Am I losing my mind?”

  
  
  
  


She, Grey, and Drogo have to go get cleared by psych because they looked at a gruesome crime scene and saw a dead person with their eyes, which can be very traumatic — plus, the organization wants to avoid being open to a lawsuit if one of them needs to be terminated because one of them happens to suffer a mental break or even something low-key, like pervasive depression that leaves them unable to do their jobs to standard. 

She get a slot in with Tarly. She knocks on his open door and says, "Hey, Dr. Tarly. It's been awhile."

He looks up at her from his desk. He says, "Call me Sam, please."

  
  
  
  


 

It takes a quick 20 minutes before Sam concludes that she can be cleared to go back to work. She pretty much just tells him the truth. She tells him that it was really terrible and upsetting to see a dead body — especially since she knew the person. She tells him that it is hard and bizarre, that professionalism requires her to act like seeing the death of a person means nothing to her. She tells him that focusing on work does help her compartmentalize a bit.

She is a little surprised when Sam tells her that her responses were very good because she thought her responses revealed that she is soft and inexperienced and maybe requires some more training. Sam just tells her that she can return to work.

And on her way out, as she brushes imaginary wrinkles from her pants, he catches her attention with a soft, "Hey," before he also says, "I'm always glad to be able to help, in any way that I can. But I think if when it comes to these sorts of assessments, if you can go to Margaery in the future, that would be best."

For a short moment, she actually feels hurt. She actually worries that she did or said something wrong.

But then it dawns on her. She says, "Oh! Because he talks about me! To you."

"Yes," Sam says. "I'd like to avoid creating breach of trust issues, if we can."

"For his sake," she supplies, rather needlessly. And then she laughs uncomfortably. "Oh, duh, of course for him. Not for me. You're not  _my_ therapist. Ah, okay. That's fine. I get it. And thank you. That's really considerate of you. He says nice things about you. He says you've been useful to him. Oh my God, is this what you are talking about? Was that a breach of trust? Oh my God, I _suck."_

Sam laughs at that, at her anxiety. And then to throw her a bone, he says, "He says nice things about you, too."

 

 

 

She shows her identification at the desk and quickly fills out a visitor slip at a chair before going back to the visitation desk to return her form. She is told to wait in a chair until she is called by the visitation deputy.

She feels like it’s pretty clear to every person that she has interacted with, that she has never been to a jail before. She is asking a lot of clarifying questions because she doesn’t want to get anything wrong.

After she is called by the visitation deputy, she is told that she cannot take her personal effects in — he is referring to her purse. And so, awkwardly and nervously, she asks him if she can run out to her car real quick?

Instead, he directs her to the lockers in the reception lobby, within plain sight.

She immediately apologizes for not seeing them — and also for wasting time with her inexperience — but he is patient and nice, so he tells her it’s not a problem, take her time.

She locks her stuff in one of the lockers before returning to him.

In the contact visitors area, Missandei spots her easily. Missy walks over to the table and sits down quickly.

She asks, “How are you?”

Yiantha scoffs. She gestures to their surroundings. And also to the jumpsuit she is wearing. She says, “I am doing great.”

  
  
  
  


Missy feels like a real impotent and useless asshole here. She asks stupid questions about whether or not Yiantha thinks she is being fed adequately — the answer is yes. She makes idiotic observations about how county jail is brighter than she expected — and Yiantha looks at her like she’s an asshole, because it is still jail.

Missandei shrinks a little bit at that, as her heart hammers in her chest. In some ways, she’s still struggling to piece together what happened in a way that makes emotional sense. She understands it mentally and logistically — but she is having a hard time reconciling that the person in front of her is her friend — and also an alleged killer.

Missy asks, “What happened?” even though she knows what happened.

Yiantha shrugs. And then she dully says, “She was stealing from me. She was stealing from all of us.” She says it tiredly, because she’s been telling a lot of people what happened. And Missandei, of all people, should already know.

“It wasn’t premeditated,” Missy says. “Did you tell your attorney that?”

 _“Of course_ I told him that,” Yiantha says. “That was probably the _first thing_ I told him — that I didn’t mean to.”

Missandei flinches.

Then she says, “How is your sister doing?”

Yiantha kind of laughs at that — humorlessly. She says, “Fuck if I know.” And then upon seeing Missandei’s frown, she pointlessly says, “She hasn’t come by to see me — not since — you know.”

And then without being asked or prompted to, Yiantha adds, “He hasn’t come by, either. I try to call and catch him, but — my homegirl Anni tells me he’s been coming ‘round them with some fake bitch, some young plastic bitch.”

Yiantha reaches up to discreetly wipe the bottom of her eyes. “I told him our baby is gonna need him — but, yeah. Fucking _men,_ right?”

  
  
  
  


She goes over to his place after work because she just wants to see him, after the shitastic day that she has had. After visiting Yiantha in jail, which was super depressing — shocker — she spent the entire night just getting hit with the angriest, saddest motherfuckers in the city because there’s something going on with the full moon _or something_ — she spent the night just getting her physical attributes and her skin color insulted or leered at — one guy actually spat on her, at her face, once he realized that she was busting him for solicitation.

She tries to laughs that off — because everyone around her is chuckling over it — like, who among them hasn’t been spat on by a belligerent citizen in the midst of committing a crime, right?     

She tiredly scrubs her face with the shitty restroom soap at work afterward. She stares at her own reflection, at the dark circles under her eyes, and she thinks that today is one of those days when the job really does not seem worth it.

Yara slaps her on the ass on the way out. Yara tells her to cheer up, tomorrow is gonna be a new shitty day.

She texts her dad and tells him she’s gonna detour. Her dad pretty much knows what’s up by this point. Her dad already knows that she goes over to Grey’s apartment on the nights that she doesn’t come home right away.   

She honestly just wants to be held by him. She honestly just wants to curl up into him and breathe him in and just feel like everything is going to be okay for just like, a short delusional moment.

She actually starts dropping a few tears when she sees his face, because it’s hard for her to hide her emotions from him. And — as he likes to repeatedly tell her — she is also just a shitty liar.  

He guides her into his apartment and shuts the front door behind her. He asks her if she wants some water or tea or something.  

She grabs onto his hand. She tells him she is fine, she doesn’t need a drink.

She wraps her arms around him tightly — to try something new.

He thinks that it’s something familiar and something he is getting used to. He actually starts taking off her clothes.

She gasps — in surprise, not arousal. She actually didn’t come over for sex, and she starts to tell him so — she opens her mouth to tell him that she actually would just rather they cuddle together, that maybe she can maybe even sleep over a little bit, with him in his bed, this time around?

But she sees his face — and his determination as he unbuttons her pants — and she also feels his anxiety and some of his worries and concerns. And she just feels _bad_ and _sad_ about what he must be going through.  She feels terrible about what he has already gone through.

So she holds onto his head and she kisses him thoroughly, as his hand pushes the loosened waistband of her pants and her underwear down.

  
  
  
  


He kicks her out of his apartment after sex again — because he has some fucking intimacy issues. And she is the coolest bitch ever because she keeps tolerating this extreme rudeness. She takes her sore legs and her sore vagina back home all tired and emotionally empty — but physically fulfilled at least.

She kicks her shoes off in the foyer and, for just a short second, entertains the idea of picking up her shoes and taking them up to her bedroom herself. But her dad likes to hose them off and dry them before doing that, and she honestly does not have the fucking energy at five in the morning.

“Baby?”

He sounds weirdly cautious, which is why she matches his tone. She says, “Daddy?”

“Oh, good, it’s really you.”

She sees her dad put down a fucking _butcher’s knife_ back on the cutting board as she walks into the dark kitchen. Her eyes go wide and she is like, “Dad, were you going to stab me, if I was an intruder?”

“You were so loud coming in today — it was uncharacteristic.”

“Okay,” she says blankly. “That totally makes sense. I see how you got to a knife in your hand, from that.”

  
  
  
  


She is chuckling sleepily around a hot cup of non-caffeinated herbal tea as she joshes around with her dad and tells him that he was probably just a real badass back in the day. Like, motherfuckers probably gave him a lot of space to walk by because his big dick energy was probably so immense. Like, he probably never got spat in the face by a creep with questionable oral hygiene.

Her dad is like, “Actually, I have.”

She says, “Oh, so it’s a rite of passage then,” as she rolls her eyes. “People are gross and terrible sometimes, Dad.”

“Oh, I know, hon,” he says dryly. “That is exactly why I hate your job.”

“But it’s totally cool for Moss and Mars to hang out with guns and bags of cocaine all day?”

“I don’t think that’s actually what they do all day?” her dad lightly quips. “I think they actually sit at a desk a lot and do standard investigative work? Besides, your brothers are idiots.”

She laughs at that — in delighted surprise.

“No, they’re not idiots,” her dad says, correcting himself. “I’m very proud of them, too. But they’re not like you. They’re made for the job. They’re —”

“Massive and muscular and tall and intimidating?” she supplies.

“Ah, no,” her dad says, now wondering what the hell his kid even _thinks_ about him. “I was going to say they’re not kind and sensitive like you are. They can disconnect. You take the work home — I know you do.”

  
  


 

She spends a pointless series of long minutes trying to convince her father — the man who raised her and made sure she made it from infancy to adulthood in one piece — that she actually isn’t that sensitive or empathetic or _such a bleeding heart._ She tells him she can be cold-hearted and dead inside like her brothers are — sometimes!

He laughingly does not buy it.

She does not consciously realize that her dad is actually cheering her up — really effectively. She does not realize that the tightness in her chest is gradually loosening and her body is relaxing again.

And then completely randomly — but not really because he has been thinking about this _a lot_ — her dad says, “You don’t always have to go over to his place, you know. It’s okay for him to come here and visit sometimes. I won’t make him uncomfortable. At least, not intentionally. I mean — I know you’re adults, and I know what you must be doing together — and that’s _fine_. You can do it here if you want. This is actually _your house,_ baby. I just don’t get to see you as much anymore. And I would also like to . . . get to know him.”

Her jaw drops. She is like, “Uhhh.”

  
  
  
  



	29. Missy is clingy?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey works overtime proving to himself and his lady that he is not psychotic — he is totally normal and good at doing normal people things! He's still bummed that his parents don't love him anymore. Missy attends another child's nameday party and gets confronted with another alternate universe life she would have lived if she didn't decide to be a badass crimefighter. Dany shows up and reminds us all that when she's not shitting on Missandei's adoration of Grey, Dany is actually a hilarious bitch and a fun friend. And then finally, Grey shows the future love of his life how he feels about spending more time with his future father-in-law.

  
  
  
  
  


He’s in the midst of trying something new and “normal.” He is lying down on his back and hanging out at home on his shitty IKEA sectional, during freaking daylight hours, with her sitting on top of him — on his stomach. They are just chatting and arguing good-naturedly about what proper breakfast food is, why her neck has been so sore lately, and whether or not it is necessary to RSVP no to invites or if damning silence carries the point across. 

They keep skirting on the edge of something sexual — she keeps carrying the conversation she is having with him forward, as she also glances down to where his shirt has been pushed up a little bit by her shifting, as she internally debates whether or not to ruin this nice bit of domesticity by sliding her butt backwards and pressing their bits together — and he keeps lazily smiling up at her, rubbing his hands across her hips, sometimes getting close to the seat of her pants before retreating and making it respectable again. 

“Naathi women are  _ aiight,”  _ he says, clearly baiting her. “But I am telling you, Summer Islander women are the really the most beautiful women in the world.”

“Okay,” she says gamely, leaning forward a little, thinking about whether or not to kiss him right now. “I don’t care. Feel how you feel. Think what you think. Also, there is more to women than how they  _ look.” _

“Yeah?” he says, his eyes going to her cleavage, which he is getting a better view of as she leans forward. 

“You smell good,” she says, kind of randomly. “What soap do you use?”

“Okay, real talk? I don’t use soap. I don’t like how it dries out my skin.”

She pauses thoughtfully, pursing her lips. “So what do you use?”

“Water. And shampoo drippings, I guess.”

“Shampoo drippings,” she says carefully, as her mouth twitches in amusement.

“Yeah, I guess that’s what you’re smelling,” he says, as his fingertips lightly run down the sides of her bare thighs, drawing out goosebumps on her skin in their wake. “I don’t need a lot of shampoo so I buy a really nice kind. It has green tea and tea tree oil. It lasts for a long time.” 

She is wearing shorts because she stopped at his place after going to the gym. 

“You’re soft,” he adds. And then he finds it necessary to clarify for some reason. He says, “I mean — your body is soft. Not your psyche or the aura of your being.”

She snorts out a short laugh at that — she can’t help it — and then she really  _ does _ lean down further to press her lips against his giving mouth, as he immediately opens up and slowly meets her tongue with his. 

He’s gotten better at kissing her — or they have gotten better at kissing each other. They haven’t talked about whether he’s a supremely quick learner or if he’s been good in the past and all he needed was to relax into it a little bit — she suspects the latter because he’s good at oral and that doesn’t just come out of nowhere. 

He used to kiss her during sex like it was battle and he was in a fight with her — pretty aggressively and as a means to an end. Or he used to kiss her inactively and submissively, just receiving her mouth and holding still. That kind of kissing made her a little nervous and unsure because he didn’t seem like he enjoyed affection. 

Now, he kisses her with his hand brushing over her cheek, running down her neck. He kisses her with short pauses mixed in, so that he can look at her face and check in with her. He kisses her with variety, sometimes slow and soft and viscous like they are underwater — other times fast and hard and deep and then just _ gone _ and leaving her bereft and wanting — before he smirks at the expression on her face. 

She can give up a lot of time just kissing him. 

Against his lips, she says, “I’m soft because I’m serious about moisturizing. Do you wanna have sex? On your fucking IKEA couch?” She is quoting him. That’s what he always calls his perfectly normal and fine sofa. She laughs these puffs of air into his mouth as she amends her suggestion. She says, “Do you wanna fuck on your fucking couch?”

“Um, okay,” he says — pretending to waffle a little bit — before he grunts and heaves himself out from under her — as he rolls and flips her body over and puts her on her back.  

“Man,” she says, raising her arms up so that it is easier for him to pull off her shirt. “It is nuts how you make stuff like shampoo drippings super sexual.”

“Hey,” he says, after he pops her t-shirt off of her head and then starts working on her bra. “I’m really just sayin’ things in a normal kinda way. You the one who is hearin’ it sexy.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He’s partially undressed and has her wrists locked in his grasp above her head, so she doesn’t distract him or freak him out by touching him, as he grabs her bare breast with his other hand, squeezes it, and then lightly bites down on her nipple before soothing it with a sucking wet kiss. She gasps, bucks up against him, pushes out a loud and long groan — and then whispers to him that he is so fucking yummy. Like, she really wants him to understand this.

And then his phone — the personal one — on the coffee table starts to ring and buzz. 

His grasp on her wrists loosens — enough for her to pull her hands away to reach up to grab his face tenderly in both of her hands. She maneuvers it to keep it oriented at her. She says, “Grey, leave it,” as he makes a move to reach for his phone. “Check it  _ after.”  _ She tries to pitch up enough to catch his pout with her lips. 

It’s too late. She only gets the corner of his mouth. He has already gotten a glance at the screen.

He immediately puts physical space between the two of them. Her hands run down his arm as he pulls away. He scoots to the far end of the sofa and tugs his pants up higher on his hips. His voice is hoarse and it cracks, as he quickly says, “Sorry, it’s my brother,” as his hand reaches out to squeeze her ankle in apology.  

  
  
  
  
  
  


He always picks up his phone right away when he gets calls from his brother because, these days, his brother is his only connection to the rest of his family, to his parents. He and his brother also have a hard time being available at the same time — though to be fair to Azzie — it’s usually Grey’s terrible schedule that is the culprit for their constant missed connections. 

Grey also always picks up just on the freak chance that someone who shares his genetics is having a health emergency and needs a kidney or a blood transfusion or bone marrow or  _ something _ like that. 

He says, “Hello? What’s up, man?” as he casts a glance at Missandei, who is lying patiently and quietly on his couch, topless and tousled, with a hand digging into her curls as she watches his side of his conversation with his brother curiously. 

He stands up then, to give himself more privacy. He starts pacing around a little bit, walking the short distance from his living room to his kitchen.

  
  
  
  
  
  


So no one is in the middle of having a medical emergency. Both of their parents are apparently totally fine — physically. Azzie is calling because he wants to know what Grey plans to do about the upcoming holiday. First, is he working the day of? Secondly, he is still catching a flight home, yeah?

Azzie says all of this with a hopeful air. He thinks that if he can communicate with mundane casualness, then he might be able to just  _ trick _ his little brother and his fucking parents into  _ having a conversation _ and reconciling. 

Every year, Grey flies home around this time of year — if not directly on the holiday, then sometime within a month of it. Their family always moves the celebration of the holiday around according to Grey’s schedule. This year, so far, has been a real fucking bummer. Their mom has done no preparation for it at all yet. She only gets ticked whenever Azzie mentions it.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She lies nude and exposed on Grey’s couch, as she completely eavesdrops on his conversation with his brother — and that is his fault because he is completely having this conversation within earshot of her.

She realizes that he is kind of doing that on purpose. She knows that he has kind of been pushing himself really hard to be more open with her and to show more of himself to her. She generally feels pride and touched by his efforts because she knows it is hard. She generally has been falling deeper and deeper in infatuation with him. It’s getting obsessive. So at least that’s been happening according to plan and stuff.

She hears him say, “No, man. I haven’t bought my plane ticket yet . . . no, I’m not going to . . . because! Because you know why! They don’t want me there! . . . Az, why would I do that? . . . Well, if you miss me so much, why don’t  _ you _ come visit  _ me?” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


After he gets off the phone, she tries to joke with him. She smiles at him and she asks him if he’s ready to go back to the sex now.

He gives her a short and toothless smile. He says, “Sorry.”

She sits up and reaches for him. She says, “Don’t be sorry,” as she grabs his fingers and gently uses them to pull him back down next to her. She reaches her hand up to cup his face, as she tilts her forehead against his cheekbone, as she presses her lips into the side of his chin. She gives him a series of short little kisses, as she feels his body incrementally relax.  

  
  
  
  
  
  


He never wants to talk that much about his family with her — but she asks anyway. She asks him if he’s okay, and he tells her that he is. He tells her he’s just a little bummed, as he pivots his face to meet her mouth full-on. 

He kisses her softly and gently, simultaneously inhaling deeply.

He tries to smile at her in a reassuring way after he pulls back to stare at her face. He runs his thumb across her bottom lip and then also down her chin, as he holds her jaw lightly and looks into her eyes. 

This is when she decides is a really good time to say, “Would you want to hang out at my place sometime? Like this? Okay, well not  _ exactly  _ like this. We can’t really be casually naked together at my place — because of my super old roommate. But like, we can do other hanging out stuff — like we can eat together, watch things together, and like have conversations and stuff, too.”

She is  _ nailing _ this hard sell. She can tell she is nailing it based on the  _ terror  _ in his eyes.

He reluctantly says, “Missandei —”

And so she thinks it’s a good idea to just go for broke.

She says, “Honestly, my dad’s been asking after you. He’d like to spend more time with you. And my dad is like —  _ so important  _ to me. He’s a huge part of my life. And you know,  _ you _ are also a  _ huge _ part of my life — I mean, not just  _ this _ — but I mean, we spend a lot of time together at work, too. And I’ve been seeing my dad less — because I’ve been seeing you more. I would like to consolidate the two things sometimes — you and him. It’s efficient? Also, if you’re not going home to the Summer Isles for the holiday, do you want to spend it with me — with me and my family?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He honestly doesn’t want to keep kicking her out of his home every time shit gets a little too real between the two of them — but he honestly just would rather she not be around sometimes because her expectations of him sometimes just makes him want to start hyperventilating. 

He’s trying to be better — he’s been on high alert and he has been tamping down on his crazy and he is been doing normal people things. Like, he’s been asking her about her day even though he fucking spends basically every waking moment with her already and he generally knows how a typical day for her breaks down. Like, he let her coyly feed him some pasta off of a fork recently even though all he wanted to do was slap it out of her hand and yell at her that he’s not a fucking baby who needs to be spoonfed. Like, he hasn’t done any alarming sex shit like holding her head down by her hair, suffocating her, or smacking her in the face as she comes. Like, he’s been pretty fucking  _ good _ lately.

So he thinks that he has kind of earned this, when he bluntly points a finger at her face and tells her, “You need to fucking calm down — and  _ stop  _ trying to make me into your  _ boyfriend.” _

She thinks that she is being  _ insanely chill _ about what he just said to her, because he really should get smacked with a fist in the face for what he just said. 

She just calmly responds with, “You _ are _ my boyfriend, Grey.”

“What?”

She gestures this long line vaguely in front of her — it makes the both of them realize that she is still not wearing a shirt — and she says, “What do you think this is? What do you think dating is? What do you think being together is?”

Honestly, he hasn’t thought this far ahead. 

Out loud, he says to her, “Honestly, I haven’t thought this far ahead.”

She does not look surprised whatsoever. She actually looks really unimpressed and a little bit annoyed with him. 

“Hey,” he says. “Do you mind giving me some down time? I’d like to think about this. Alone.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She doesn’t even want to drink, but she starts gulping down plastic cups of chilled rose to cope with being completely bamboozled into attending a four-year-old’s nameday party full of suburban moms and dads. Irri assured her that there would be interesting adults at the party, that it wouldn’t just be all kids.

Irri was sort of right. The party is half adults, half kids. The adults generally talk about scintillating things like their dairy allergies, how their kid’s fine motor skills are, what their kid did in the morning, what their kid did in the afternoon, traffic, the weather, the lawn, and how all grandmas have a recipe for baked beans.

Not Missandei’s grandma, but sure.

Missy generally sits by herself with a paper plate of salads and the aforementioned beans, and she darkly wishes that she was hanging out at the sight of another homicide or that she was getting spat in face by another piece of shit man with an unearned sense of superiority and dominion over her — instead of  _ this _ .

“And how old are your kids, Melissa?”

In the ensuing pause, Missandei jolts to life because she realizes that the question was actually directed at her. She doesn’t bother correcting her name because she will probably never see these people again. She just says, “Oh, I don’t have kids. Just nieces and nephews.”

“Missy knows a dozen languages!” Irri announces, awkwardly trying to facilitate conversation.

“Oh! Gina is in a language immersion school right now! You don’t happen to know Valyrian, do you? Gina, say something in Valyrian!”

“Ah,” Missandei says, standing up from her seat, presumably to go dump her empty plate. “I don’t know Valyrian, unfortunately.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Dany shows up two hours late and shows up empty-handed even. She breezes into Irri’s house in her designer heels, her perfectly glossy platinum hair, and her eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. She looks ridiculously unrelatable within the context of this party.

And Missy smiles in relief.

Dany heads straight to Missandei. Dany says, “What is this shit? How long have you been here?”

“About an hour.”

“You look very pretty today, by the way.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Dany has this combination of white lady entitlement, beautiful woman entitlement, rich person entitlement, and boss bitch in a man’s world entitlement. It is a scary mixture — Missy has seen Dany make a man two decades older than her cry — and sometimes it is also a hilarious mixture.

Dany spends the party further ostracizing Missandei from the rest of the guests just through her proximity. Dany doesn’t take off her glasses, yet still manages to look like she is rolling her eyes constantly. She complains constantly about where Irri and her husband live — so fucking far out in the middle of nowhere. 

It is actually in King’s Landing suburb, just ten miles out of city center. It is not in the boonies. There is a Target and about ten Starbucks in town.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He has decided that he doesn’t want to meet Missandei’s family or spend time with her dad because it would make him feel awkward and uncomfortable. He reasons to himself that he didn’t think he was signing up for all of  _ that _ . He reasons that he was signing up for one date. And then another date. And then sex. And then more sex. He reasons that he wasn’t signing up for an entire life together with her — because he likes his life just the way it is. 

He is bad at talking about this kind of stuff, so he unconsciously just starts avoiding it and not mentioning it to her. He is pretty good at avoiding things he’d rather not deal with.

When Sam tells him this pointless allegorical story about how Sam really didn’t want to meet his wife’s really shitty father at the beginning of their relationship either, but he ended up doing so because he wanted to be there “for her” and to “support her” — well, Grey just thinks that he’s not  _ an idiot _ so he understands the logic of why people in relationships do things that they don’t want to do.

He would just rather spend the holiday sleeping and watching a lot of TV.

But his colleagues are nosy busy-bodies, too. They find out that he’s orphaned during the holiday because they all go around chatting about plans during a break in their meeting. 

Daario offers to take Grey with him to hang out with his mom and his mom’s new shitty boyfriend — spoiler, his mom will  _ definitely _ hit on Grey aggressively after she gets drunk and her new boyfriend will  _ definitely  _ be a bigot — but Drogo interrupts them and tells them all that Grey isn’t going to wherever Daario’s mom’s trailer is parked, and he’s not going to the Iron Islands or to Casterly Rock or to Tarth — he’s going to go to Drogo’s mom’s house because Grey actually has met Drogo’s mom, so it will be somewhat familiar territory.

Grey just lets this decision happen — in front of Missandei’s face. 

She reasonably gets angry with him afterward, when they are alone at his apartment. She crosses her arms defensively over her chest — to hide that she is actually hurt — and she asks him why.

“It just makes more sense,” he tells her. 

He does not understand what she expected from him — did she really expect him to stand up in the middle of the meeting and loudly declare that he actually has to spend the holiday with Missandei because she is being really  _ fucking clingy _ and is trying to commandeer every waking moment of his fucking  _ life? _

“It makes more sense . . . to go to Drogo’s mom’s house for the holiday rather than meet my brothers and spend time with my dad,” she says slowly.

“Yeah.”

  
  
  
  
  


 


	30. Grey and Missy have their first fight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey is a major asshole to the future love of his life, because she cares about him too much and he can't handle how he feels about himself. Missy temporarily becomes a stage five clinger because she cannot handle how the future love of her life is behaving towards her. She tries to have a relationship talk with him. He has a hard time responding to that appropriately. And then they have to go on a business trip together!

  
  
  
  


 

Neither of them particularly have fun during their respective holiday dinners, because they are in the midst of chaos — of a storm of activity and shouting and tiny little spats between her nieces and nephews or tiny little spats between Drogo’s sisters and their kids. 

It is utter pandemonium where they are both at, and all Drogo is doing is parking his ass in front of the TV, slouching in an armchair with a bottle of beer and watching the game as all the women cook in the kitchen. Grey is sitting ramrod straight — uncomfortably, because this is the fucking worst time ever, what the fuck! — and he is simultaneously trying to block out all of the noise but also keeping his ears and eyes alert and open, just in case. Just in case someone starts to die and he needs to jump into action.

He is also in the middle of a tense text-fight with Missandei, who still cannot shut up about how she is feeling about him, so she has taken to explaining it to him over and over, through text messages. He already thought it was  _ a lot _ when what she was feeling for him was positive and effusive and warm and sexual. He now knows that the pendulum swings both ways and it is still  _ a lot _ now that what she is feeling for him is angry and confused and frustrated and petulant. 

And when he doesn’t respond to her  _ right away _ — she works herself up into greater rage, and it gets worse for him. Like, she starts calling him just so that he can send her straight to voicemail, just so she can leave him angry voicemails that he doesn’t listen to, but that get transcribed through his app. Her voicemails are telling him that he’s a fucking asshole. And that he is being really selfish.

And he is like — he knows. Obviously. He knows he is selfish. His mom already clued him onto this fact. Thanks for the reminder of shit he already knows, Missandei.

“Bud,” Drogo says, swinging his head over to look at Grey. “Your phone is just really  _ blowing up.  _ What did you  _ do to her? _ You sure you don’t want to try and swing by her brother’s place later to make things good?”

“She is being  _ fucking _ hysterical, and she needs to calm the  _ fuck _ down,” Grey says heatedly.

Drogo lets out a low whistle. He says, “Yeah, I’m gonna definitely quote that during my toast at your guys’ wedding.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


So her brothers’ and sister-in-laws’ first impression and her dad’s second impression of Grey is pretty much that Grey is  _ an asshole,  _ so that is really awesome. 

They also think she is being psycho, with how much she texting, with how her phone is glued to her hand — and also with the rolling waves of anger that is dripping off of her.   

Her aunties are trying to dispel the terrible energy she is bringing to their family gathering by making jokes about how her boyfriend is actually imaginary, and she’s just trying to cover it up with fake texting.

Totally a sick, badass burn. Respect. But their jokes are coming at a really inopportune time. 

Mars pats her on the shoulder and says, “Sis, it’s cool. We’ll meet him some other time. No big deal.”

“No, you won’t,” she says darkly. And then clarifying, she says, “Because I’m going to fucking kill him. He will be too fucking dead for you to meet.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He wants to climb into deprivation chamber after he is finally able to claw his way out of Drogo’s mom’s house. He is more than ready to get a break from the random screaming of the kids and the random screaming of Drogo’s sisters — just to fucking ask one another to pass a fucking plate of food, goddamn — and he is ready to get a break from the million of fucking questions that came out of Drogo’s mom’s face. She basically wanted to know every minute of what he’s been up to since she last saw him, which was years ago.

He wanted to tell Drogo’s mom that he’s been killing way fewer people than he used to, so that’s good. It’s good for his mental health probably. And he’s been hanging out with far more sex workers. Which might be bad for his mental health? He’s not completely sure. His brain is just completely fucked up because it is  _ weak, _ and he was apparently traumatized by a fucking dead piece of shit who is just continuing to ruin him from the grave. So there’s no justice in the world. His parents don’t love him anymore. His woman won’t fucking leave him alone for one fucking second to let him  _ breathe. _ Just normal life shit like that. 

Instead, he just told Drogo’s mom he’s cool. He’s fine. Chilling and hanging out and stuff mostly. Normal stuff. 

He’s not even home for an hour — the leftovers have not even gone cold in his fridge — when he hears rapid knocking on his door.

She has no fucking shame.

He says, “Oh my God, stop!” when he opens the door.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She starts laying into him right away. He thinks it is great and he definitely deserves this because  _ he stopped texting her  _ in order to fucking  _ eat _ holy _ shit.  _

She tells him — again — that he is being selfish. She tells him that he really hurt her feelings. She tells him that she feels like he is disengaging, and that scares her. She tells him that she is really insecure sometimes because she doesn’t know how much he likes her because he doesn’t give her very much validation or words of affirmation. She tells him that she really fucking does _ not  _ want to smother him, but she feels him pulling away and, clearly, it is making her completely psycho because she is so emotionally attached to him right now, dammit. She tells him that she just likes him  _ so much  _ and it’s so obvious, and she knows that there’s a part of him that finds that really gross. She tells him she’s pretty sorry for going nuts on him all day.

Then she shouts, “What have I  _ become! _ Oh my _ God!” _

In response to all of that — to her entirely self-aware, vulnerable, and honest assessment of herself — well, he just can’t handle it with elegance and class. He just shuts down inside. He tells himself that this is entirely too much for him — it is  _ really  _ intense — and he fucking  _ knew _ this was going to happen. 

He says, “So, does this means that neither of us will be requesting department transfers any time soon, then?”

Her eyes go wide — and after a second, they also go watery. She says, “That’s all you have to say to me?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


So rather than sobbing her guts out and telling him all about her feelings again — which is what he predicted from her — she actually musters up more energy to tell him off some more. She does cry a little bit, but they are kind of like, fortifying rage tears.

She tells him that he is fucking  _ immature.  _ She tells him that he actually doesn’t have as great of a grasp on human emotion and on human psychology that he thinks he does. He only knows people as archetypes and as statistics — and in a relationship, that is  _ not enough. _ She tells him that she is clearly really upset right now, and it doesn’t even look like he cares, so it seems like he also has a fucking empathy issue. She tells him sometimes he is really fucking mean to her and she puts up with it because she cares about him a lot — but it is sometimes excessive! Sometimes he is excessively an asshole! She tells him that he has some psychological issues that he needs to work through.

He snaps at that. He snaps  _ at her  _ and he says, “No shit, Missandei! You think you are telling me shit I don’t know! _ I know!” _

She visibly deflates at that. And then she says, “Do you even  _ like me?” _

“Sometimes,” he says. “You are so  _ needy  _ other times, though.”

The initial impact of that feels like getting hit in the face. So she actually flinches because it’s a lot of her worst fears confirmed. She’s probably falling for a sociopath. Wonderful. 

And then she recovers. She angrily tells herself that this actually _can’t_ be worst than getting spat in the face by some asshole who tried to _buy_ her _vagina._ She tells herself that this isn’t worst than feeling like scum because she wasn’t even close to being able to help her friend enough. She tells herself that this isn’t worst than feeling helpless, because she isn’t able help _people_ _enough,_ in her job.

“Yeah!” she shouts. “I am  _ needy! _ I am a person who cares about you and who finds happiness in  _ being with you.  _ I don’t know  _ why! _ So maybe I need to go to a fucking shrink, too!” 

She is referring to the fact that she cannot make herself feel attraction to seemingly healthy traits in men — like emotional availability and more advanced communication skills. She is referring to the fact that she is so disgusted and so bored by men who are perfectly nice and stable. 

Grey thinks that she means that she has to be  _ fucking crazy _ to be attracted to him. And he fucking  _ agrees. _ He’s been telling this to himself since the very beginning — that this woman is fucking  _ nuts.  _ That she has some fucking bizarre fetish for dickless men who are only good at doing  _ shitty things. _

“Do you really think I’m needy?” she asks, her voice quieter now.

_ “Yeah,” _ he says.

“That’s a terrible thing to say to me,” she says despondently. “Do you want me to need you less?” And then after pausing — she’s tearing up again — she adds, “Do you want me not to need you at all?”

He doesn’t even know. He doesn’t know what that would even look like. Because he is  _ an idiot. _ And he doesn’t know what to do or what to say that is still truthful — that wouldn’t be hurtful to her. 

So he says nothing.

  
  
  
  
  
  


So they start having sex — without resolving anything else. It is all they have sometimes. 

He signals to her that he would be open to sex, by turning around and walking into his bedroom.

She is stunned — because that is a very inappropriate response to this heartbreaking thing she just asked him.  

She follows him into the bedroom nonetheless. 

There, she takes off her clothes because that’s probably all he wants from her — and the thought depresses her enough that she just starts crying for real, right there in front of him. 

He reaches up to cup her cheek, but she responds to that just by turning herself around because she figures that he doesn’t want to look at her crying face. She automatically starts climbing onto his bed because this is usually how this goes. 

He watches her shaking shoulders. And he just feels like  _ shit. _

And then he softly says, “We don’t have to do this — I — I don’t know what I was just thinking.”

She responds to that like how she thinks he would want — because she just wants to make him  _ feel something _ for her. She says, “Do you want to go get the rope?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He feels like he constantly wants to back out of this and prove to the both of them that he is  _ not _ this person, even as he cinches the rope tightly around her wrists and watches her bend her body over — as he watches her sink her face toward his mattress. Her hands are tied behind her back and she is on her knees, facing away from him. 

His heart is pounding in his chest, as he says, “Okay, we shouldn’t do this. What the fuck? Let’s stop.”

She lowers her face more and raises her bottom up higher — again, showing more of herself to him on purpose. 

He shuts his eyes. He wants to ask her why she wants for him to humiliate her like this. He wants the answer from himself, too. 

She says, “Come on. I want to.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He tries to get her to just lie down on her stomach or on her side so it doesn’t stress out her neck — she’s still been complaining about it a fair bit — he thinks it’s because she uses too many pillows when she sleeps — but she doesn’t listen to him. She doesn’t listen to him on the pillows thing, and she also refuses to lie down right now. She resolutely engages a lot of unnecessary muscles as she bends over and hovers. 

He says, “Missandei. Come on, relax. Lie down. You’ll feel better.”

“Dude, don’t tell me what to do,” she says snappishly. “And why don’t you just start  _ fucking me  _ already?”

“What does that even mean?” he mutters, as his hand gently palms her butt. He is referring the way that they have to have sex — and his injury. 

“Put your fucking mouth  _ on me.” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


They have really terrible, really emotional, really good sex. 

He was right. Her neck is  _ killing her.  _ Her head is bent far back and her neck is achingly sore as she shoves her tension-relieving screams into his mattress. She doesn’t want to prove him right by collapsing and falling down though — and she also doesn’t want to change positions and lose the hard, steady, consistent, delicious contact of her mouth between her legs.

She doesn’t know why they have to have sex this way all the time — and she doesn’t mean the rope. She actually means one-sidedly. She means with him keeping his pants on. She means with her never being allowed to give him any pleasure. She’s been too nervous to ask him, because he can’t even handle it when she asks him to have like, a meal with her dad.  

She starts crying into the bed because it is  _ so good,  _ and he is  _ so good.  _ She suffocates a little bit as she sucks in and blows out recycled air, again and again. 

She almost passes out as she orgasms — because she bears down hard, bites down hard, and stops breathing all together — as her entire body clenches up.

She vaguely recognizes the feel of his hand, sliding underneath her hot, sweaty cheek, pulling her head up a little bit. Her neck strains — it hurts — she cries out vocally — and gasps in cool, clean air.   __

  
  
  
  
  
  


After she comes down from her orgasm, she tries not to just collapse bonelessly into the bed. Because he would really love the confirmation of how fucking wrong she is all the time. She actually smacks her tied hands against the bottom of her spine. She says, “Can you untie me?”

His fingers are immediately on her, making quick work of it.

Then she says, “Thank you.” 

He won’t look at her. Because he is shitty at looking at  _ her face _ when they are done doing personal, beautiful, intimate shit together.

So she says, “Can you hand me my clothes? I can leave after I get dressed.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She has to go straight from prostitute duty to her flight. Her dad is a godsend and he is the primary reason she doesn’t miss her flight. She is still in a leotard and has smeared dark eyeliner around her eyes when she comes home and drops her gun on the side table. Typically, none of them would never be so lax with their pieces, but this is her dad. He is more strict and strident with guns than anyone else she knows — besides Grey.  

She leaves her gun for her dad to put away, because she doesn’t have the time right now. She just runs into the bathroom to find hangers of her wifey clothes already displayed over her shower, waiting for her.

She squeezes her sweaty body into the charcoal pencil skirt and vigorously rubs at her undereyes, removing the smeared makeup. All of her toiletries are already packed and stuffed in her carry-on bag.

At the foot of the stairs, she finally releases the breath she’s been holding in. She spies him with a mug of coffee and her rolling suitcase in the foyer. He puts coconut milk in it for her. She gratefully says, “Daddy, you are the _ best  _ man in my life.”

He smiles. He says, “I know.”

Her gun is already gone.  

Her work phone buzzes.

She gives her dad a quick kiss on the cheek goodbye.

He tells her, “Hey, you be  _ very careful, _ okay? There is always time to assess and go down the mental checklist, right? Remember.”

She pauses at that and straightens. She hands her coffee back to her dad, only having taken one sip. 

She says, “Dad, I’ll remember.”

And then she kicks her front door open inelegantly in her heels — and she is stunned to see Grey walking up her stoop. He breaks his gaze away soon after they make eye contact, he is stooping and leaning down to grab her suitcase for her.

She fights him off, trying to put her hand right in his stupidass handsome face, which he lightly slaps away. She mutters that she’s fucking got it. She uneasily lifts the thing and then drops it down a step as she grabs her carry-on with her other hand.

He says, “Just give it to me,  _ holy shit. _ I  _ get it.  _ You are an independent woman and you don’t need my help. But I also don’t fucking want to take a detour to the hospital after you crack your dumb face on the sidewalk. Like, that’s fucking inconvenient for me.” 

He is cranky and sleep-deprived, too. He is annoyed that she tried to shove his face away with her hand. 

And he totally doesn’t realize that her dad is just on the other side of the door. He totally doesn’t realize that her dad heard everything he just said to her.

She reaches behind her for one last squeeze of her dad’s hand. She says, “I’ll call you later tonight, when I get a moment, yeah?”

Her dad steps forward a little bit — a little sheepish that he accidentally overheard some of their . . . conflict. He says, “Yeah, when you can, honey.”

Grey looks startled. This is  _ exactly _ why he didn’t want to have dinner with Missandei’s dad. It’s because he’s a fucking  _ loser _ and  _ not worthy _ of this man’s daughter. 

Grey drops her suitcase from his hands. He says, “Oh! Hey! Good morning, sir. Oh, uhhh —”

“It’s okay,” her dad says, easily. “I know she can be pretty stubborn sometimes. It  _ would _ be annoying to stop over at the emergency room. You’d both miss your flight.”

Grey cannot tell if her dad is joking or if he is serious or if he is sarcastically bitter and pissed and just  _ hates Grey _ for being sexually deviant with his very nice daughter. So Grey just feels like he wants to barf.

  
  
  
  
  
  


His hand lightly and briefly brushes over shelf of her butt before his warm hand presses comfortingly into her hip. He deftly maneuvers the both of them through the gravel walkway as she stares at the golf cart in front of them like it is her lifeline.  

“Jon!” Grey says cheerfully, softly patting her bottom as she grabs onto the cart and heaves herself into the first empty seat. 

“Joseph!” Jon exclaims, also holding his arms out. They are hugging friends now. “Your wife didn’t bring the right footwear!”

“I know. I tried to tell her! She just didn’t want to listen!”

She smiles through her teeth at that.

 

 

 

 


	31. Missy and Grey go on a golf vacation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey has to do his job whilst having war flashbacks to the time(s) he had dirty sex with the future love of his life with her hands all tied up. Missandei is really cute and shy around everyone in this chapter, but she eventually recovers enough personality to say nice things to her man. Lysa Arryn is in an unhappy marriage, duh. And then Grey and Missy have a nice conversation in bed! Yay!

  
  
  
  


The months of obsessively practicing, golf channel-watching, and magazine-reading — plus Grey’s comparative youth giving him a significant edge over Jon in terms of endurance and power — pays off. It pays off enough that the dull shit coming out of his mouth is convincing enough to also bore their spectators to the point where Missandei gets to hop into a golf cart in order to speed off with Lysa for a “cocktail break”

Lysa flicks her nails at him and Jon. She says, “Continue chatting. We’ll be back with refreshments.”

He glances at Missandei, who doesn’t expect his attention, so her face is momentarily blank before she realizes he is staring at her. She gives him a small and shy close-mouth smile before she studiously averts her eyes.

She has been nervous around him all day — he’s been feeling like scum for far longer than that — and he is pretty sure that this is one of the many reasons why colleagues are not supposed to give firsthand knowledge of their weird sex shit with one another. He is pretty sure that it’s hard to erase the memory of getting tied up nakedly or tying up a naked woman before tauntingly issuing a challenge or before getting taunted for being such a shitty asshole _fuck him forever_.

Jon clears his throat — momentarily distracting Grey from the process of mentally listing out all of his bizarrely specific sex-related shortcomings — Jon has told Grey that he is coming down with a cold — before the man wheezily tells his wife to let one of “the boys” fetch drinks — referring to the staff of impossibly identical young towheaded caddies standing at the ready — but his wife waves him off as she slips an arm around Missandei’s elbow and tells him that they, the ladies, can do some girl talk while they take in a change of scenery.

Though Missy is a bit startled by the random and unpredicted familiarity, she tries not to show it on her face or body. Because she does not want to be lectured later in agitated whispers, in a bedroom of the vacation home that they are staying at, under the hospitality of the Arryns. She obediently climbs back into the golf cart that Lysa is directing her to.

Jon coughs before smiling goodbye to his wife, who hops into the driver’s side. Missandei holds on tightly to the edge of her seat as the golf cart jolts to life. Her calves flex as her toes press to the floor of the cart.  

“You two are a really striking couple!” Lysa shouts to Missandei over the initial bumps in the ride before they hit asphalt and the cart smooths out. The wind whips Lysa’s hair into a mess around her face as she asks, “How long have you been married again!”

Missy presses her hand to her chest to make sure that the tiny buttons on her blouse are still holding the material together. She hollers back, “About four months!”

“Ah! The beginning is always the easiest time!”

  
  
  
  


Missandei can’t help but let her shyness lead the conversation. She rationalizes this to herself. She tells herself that, like her true self, Jenny can also be rather reserved and quiet. Of the two of them, Joseph does most of the talking.

They have to wait for two martinis and a pitcher of sangria to get made — sangria is not a menu item at all, so the staff is frantically cutting up fruit and opening bottles of wine. The staff nervously insists that they will run over the sangria once they are finished making it, but Lysa argues for not being troublesome. She insists that they can take a pitcher in their golf cart without spilling.

Missandei does not think so, but she keeps her mouth shut on this.

She just stands around a little awkwardly, a little anxious considering how well her last conversation alone with Lysa and her friend went. She is sipping from her drink feeling her heels sinking into the turf and as Lysa loosely crosses her arms over her chest and brags more about her “brilliant” and “perfect” son who incites a lot of “petty jealousy” from his peers because it is hard for others to understand the pressures of upholding their family name — without any self-consciousness. Missy hums out sounds of agreement to punctuate Lysa’s humblebrags, in order to avoid potential offense.

“His father does not understand that he is a sensitive sort,” Lysa says conversationally. “Jon does not understand that young boys, as with young girls, must be nurtured and heard. Are you close with your parents?”

Missandei takes a cautious sip of her martini, trying not to spill her glass — as she says, “I am. Or I was. My mother passed away a couple — four years ago. It is just my dad and me now.”

“That’s a shame,” Lysa says. “I’m sorry about your mother. It is hard to lose a mother. I lost mine young also.”

“Oh, I’m sorry about that,” Missy says.

“It’s okay. My father didn’t know how to raise girls though,” Lysa continues, taking down the rest of her martini, which is still nearly half-full, down in one continuous gulp. “I suppose that is how I came to be married to such an old man.”

  
  
  
  


Missandei tries to imbue herself with grace and calm understanding as shit with Lysa continues to get way weird again — she is probably cursed or really terrible at this aspect of her job. She helplessly witnesses Lysa become completely shit-faced in no time at all, in one of Valyria’s most elite and exclusive country clubs. The staff brings Lysa crisp, fresh cocktails with an indulgent smile, as Missandei glances to the activity behind the bar, wondering when the fuck the sangria will be done.

Lysa asks Missandei when Jenny met her husband and under what circumstances. Missandei recites the memorized info from their book. She met Joseph through work. Her company was organizing an event for his firm. She was the lead manager. He asked her out to dinner just weeks into the planning. They found that they got along very well — and that was it. The rest is history. They haven’t been separated since. The story is adequately cute and really nondescript to the point of being forgettable.

Lysa wants to know if Jenny gets along with her in-laws. Missandei says they all get along very well, though her mother-in-law is a bit opinionated. But that is to be expected with mother-in-laws, isn’t it?

Lysa amicably shrugs and explains that she is curious because she never really met hers. They were dead long before she and Jon married.

Not for the first time, Lysa sloppily mentions that she is Jon’s third wife.

“How is he in bed? Your husband?”

Missy cannot hide the surprise from her face. She also can’t hide the choking she is doing on her drink.

She coughs into her wrist before she says, “Pardon?”

Lysa then laughs, reaching her hand out to lightly nudge Missandei. Lysa says, “Darling, you must excuse the intrusiveness that a few drinks will stir up.”

  
  
  
  


After catching back up to the husbands at the twelfth hole, Missandei watches Lysa pour and hand her husband a glass of red sangria before she figures that she should probably hop to it and do her duty. She basically copies Lysa’s actions and carefully hands Grey his own glass of fruity wine, with both of her hands carefully clutching onto the glass like she is afraid of spilling and getting his nice shoes wet — and that is because she is totally afraid of doing that very thing.

She hears him quietly laugh as he takes the glass from her with one hand, still grasping a club in his other hand. He says, “Thanks.”

He gives her a small cheers before he sips, before he grimaces a little bit and turns to explain to Jon that he typically does not like to drink so much sugar.

Jon teasingly asks Grey just why he is worried about sugar already, at his age. Jon tells Grey that, healthwise, it only gets worse, not better — as he winces and touches his own belly. Jon says, “Might as well enjoy life while you are at your healthiest, Joe,” as he blindly reaches behind him for his wife’s hand.

And with a softness that neither Grey nor Missandei feel comfortable with, Jon kisses the back of his wife’s hand — and she smiles serenely.

  
  
  
  


The sun is starting to set and Lysa had declared that they will dine al fresco because the bleeding sky is so beautiful. They have to hurry back to the vacation home for this reason — there is staff waiting.

“She’s unhappy in her marriage,” Missandei quietly tells Grey, when they are alone in the rental car again, as he puts the car in reverse.

“Yeah?” he says, swiveling around to look through the back window as he backs out of the parking spot. He’s not altogether surprised by the information because he has surmised the same. “Who isn’t though?” he mutters.

“My parents weren’t,” Missandei says simply. “Though perhaps it’s because my mom died before she and my dad could come to resent each other.” It’s a light and completely baseless joke — because sometimes she makes dark jokes on purpose to match him in tone.

He pauses to look at her — his eyes searching her face for a silent moment and his hand hanging casually on the steering wheel — before he says, “Come to think, my parents are happy with one another, too. I’m probably the one blight in their otherwise perfect and idyllic lives.”

“Don’t say that,” she admonishes softly.

That makes him smile — just very briefly and self-consciously — before he puts his attention back on the car and on driving them the twenty minutes back to the house they are staying in.

  
  
  
  


To Lysa’s utter annoyance and to Jon’s utter delight, Grey requests a grand tour of the property before dinner. Grey solicits a very comprehensive tour and even asks questions about the garage and the pantry because he noticed that the garage is well insulated, and he had noticed that the pantry’s pull-out drawers has dovetail joinery. Jon is impressed by Grey’s attention to detail and pulls out the drawers to reveal an old set of silverware, a utility draw full of miscellaneous items collected over the years, from gum to fishing wire to batteries, and a drawer of steak knives and butcher’s twine.

They are told long-winded story after long-winded story about the genesis of every little thing, with follow-up questions from Grey, as they dip in and out of each room. They ignore Lysa’s aggravation and her not-so-subtle statements about how dinner is getting cold.

They learn that this is a house that holds particular sentimental value for Jon. He repeats the name Jeyne to them as he shows them the unique features of each space. He would say things about what Jeyne’s favorite color for drapes were and what her preferences for lighting were.

It takes Missandei a few moments to realize that Jeyne was Jon’s first wife and from the way he talks about how he rented a sander to refinish the floors himself, she figures out that this vacation home was a property they scrimped and saved and acquired together, back before Jon’s company really took off.

“I like all of the brass,” Grey says smoothly, referring to all of the drawer and door handles.

Jon laughs at that — clapping Grey on the back before he says, “It was very a la mode back when this house was built.”  

  
  
  
  


Dinner is plates of inordinately large and decadent t-bone steaks laid down by a woman in a head covering — she is one of the few visible ethnic minorities in Valyria. Though Lysa is cross that the staff neglected to cut up pieces of her husband’s steak into tiny bites for him, Jon steadfastly remains in good spirits, as he sips from the glass of bourbon his wife continually gets up to refill for him. He tells them that the bourbon washes away the germs and that his taste buds are currently shit so it’s actually a waste of bourbon. He laughs and wheezes and jokingly tells his wife to break out the second tier whisky because it makes no difference.

Missy, who is not a fan of eating huge chunks of dead animal, politely oohs and ahhs over how well the steak is cooked before she shoves elegant-sized pieces into her mouth and hastily chews through it in order to be polite. She is wondering if she is going to be stuck on this shitty all-animal diet for the entire next week. Not without judgement, she also wonders if Jon’s apparent health is due to this diet.

About half an hour into the meal, Grey wordlessly reaches over to her plate and starts slicing a square chunk out from the middle of her steak.

It catches Jon’s attention, who says, “Joe, if you’d like seconds, we have plenty left over. We can get the cook to make you another —”

“The staff has left for the night,” Lysa interjects.

“It’s okay,” Grey offers quickly, pulling that chunk of Missandei’s steak onto his plate. “We like to share. She can’t eat that much — small appetite.”

  
  
  
  


The Arryns retire to bed apologetically early, with Jon wryly stating that he needs the rest in order to decimate Joe on the course tomorrow. Grey good-naturedly returns smack-talks in the corniest way, to the general tune of, “Oh yeah? We’ll see, old man!” That’s how Missandei learns that Grey cannot dish it out when he is not allowed to dip into the gallows for the hilariously petty things he sometimes says.

She goes about her bedtime routine quickly and silently — washing her face, brushing her teeth, wrapping up her hair, changing into her night clothes — in the locked bathroom as she frantically does the mental math and thinks about when the steak in her belly is going to come out as poop and stink up the bathroom in his presence.

She likes how she is not shy about bending over and letting him eat her out from behind, but she cannot handle having a bowel movement in a locked bathroom because of the risk of smells wafting out.

Kind of low-key mortified by many different kinds of shame, she pretty much run right by him and sneaks under the bed covers as he trades places with her, heading into the bathroom.

She is pretty sure his bathroom routine consists of peeing, washing his hands, brushing his teeth and flossing, because of course he is one of those people who have never had a cavity ever before in his life.

  
  
  
  


She only does this type of work with him so as he turns off the light, she wonders if Alayaya sometimes sleeps in the same bed as Tal — and if that is something that Tal ever feels weird about, since Tal is in a long term relationship. Missy wonders how honest Tal tries to be with his girlfriend — without breaching security or if he just completely omits part of himself from her. Missy also wonders when the hell she is going to get a real dinner date going with Alayaya so that she can try to bond with Alayaya and force Alayaya into being her new buddy.

Missandei has been really hyperaware of her apparently _ubiquitous_ neediness — ever since he told her that it is _disgusting_ because she is gross. Missandei has been trying to figure out where the hell it comes from — if it came from an absent father who worked too much, but who also bought her presents like a car when she got her license and who called her his little princess until she hurt his feelings and asked him to stop referring to her as such in public because she took one fucking women’s studies class in college and let it go way to her head.

She has theorized that maybe it came from being left out of all of her brothers’ fun shit. She has wondered if she is maybe misdirecting the loneliness that the loss of her mom left behind and trying to heal herself through sex with someone who doesn’t seem like he is even capable of emotionally availability.

She has also wondered if she is just fucking _normal,_ and if he is just fucking _gaslighting_ her because he is a bastard who has had such a difficult past few years that have left him scarred and unable to trust anyone anymore.

  
  
  
  


“Good night,” she says softly, lying on her back within a foot of the edge of the bed, with her fingers intertwined together on her stomach, and for a moment, she is met with silence. She presses her lips together as she inhales deeply and then breathes it out.

Then she belatedly worries that her sigh sounds petty and juvenile — she was honestly just breathing.

But then his deep voice quietly responds back with, “Good night.”

And then, unexpectedly, his hand finds hers underneath the blanket. He squeezes her fingers softly in his warm palm.

Then, he says, “Do you wanna . . . come over here?”

She doesn’t really believe that he is saying what he is saying — so there is a moment of hesitation and silence as she freezes.

It’s when she feels the light tug on her fingers that she immediately rolls over and, with hot cheeks, shyly and immediately tucks her head underneath his chin. She braces herself for the push away, because maybe she has misread the signs. After all, he doesn’t mix work with personal and he is strictly by the book while they are on the clock.

She shuts her eyes.

She feels his strong arms coming around her, enveloping her shoulders and her head in a squeeze that becomes tighter and tighter, as her cheekbone gets pressed hard into the cords of his neck. She breathes in the scent of him deeply — holding in the scent for a moment before she releases a breath. It sounds like another sigh.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “For what I said to you.”  

He has to keep it vague precisely because they are on the clock. But she still understands what he means. She starts rapidly blinking back tears as her heart starts to beat hard. She meekly says, “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not,” he says, as his arms around her loosen. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot — and I feel . . . ashamed by the way I behaved. I’m sorry.”

She frees her arms from his hold, and she sneaks her hands up to cup his face in the dark. She repeats, “It’s okay,” as her heart pounds in her throat. She knows that she is forgiving him too quickly and too easily, but this is just honestly the kind of person she is.

She holds his cheeks and internally debates herself for a few slow seconds, before she decides to just risk it. She blindly searches for his mouth with hers in the dark, first catching his upper lip before she makes a minor adjustment and softly sighs out her relief as she gently lays her lips against his.  

She feels relief again, when he returns the affection, when he starts softly moving his mouth against hers, kissing her back.  

They lay in the dark like that, exchanging kisses silently, hands rubbing and squeezing each other’s bodies in comfort. She feels him go underneath the hem of her shirt, to press his calloused skin against hers. She returns the favor by grasping him to her body so tightly, squeezing.

She tells herself that she will not force him to meet her family. She will not ask him for too much because everyone needs to goes at their own pace. She tells herself she must be on her best behavior from here on out, so that she doesn’t scare him away with the enormity of how she feels about him.

On his side of things, he is being ever so careful not to escalate this and make it strictly sex- and goal-oriented. He lets himself be held by her and he lets himself be kissed by her and he tracks his own pulse and his own heartbeat — and he keeps telling himself that he is okay and that this is survivable, that this is very pleasantly survivable.

He has to amp himself to squeeze her body before pulling away from her kiss. He has to build up the confidence to say, “Maybe after we get home —” He is hesitating a little bit. “Maybe we can schedule some time for you and I to talk some things out — and maybe if that goes okay, maybe we can also schedule one dinner with your dad?”

She can’t see his expression in the dark — and she doesn’t think he can see hers either, which might be for the best, because she generally is a slow emotional learner. Her face is currently just bleeding out the kind of desperate gratitude that will probably make him uncomfortable if he could see it.

  
  
  
  


He wakes up in a sweaty sudden panic, with a phantom erection, and his movement restricted.

He finds her curled up right against him, with her soft fist resting on his chest, close to her mouth, with a leg thrown over his body, over his thighs, close to where his erection would’ve been — completely unaware of his anxiety.

The entire situation puts him in a shitty mood almost right away, and he has to work to mitigate his feelings about it because she is really doing nothing to him, besides existing and inciting his attraction to her by existing.

He tries to shift her without waking her up, so that he can get up and empty his bladder to see if that will help get rid of his distracting ghost boner.  

She groans as he attempts to move her. And then her eyes pop open — her face easily transitioning to a smile when she realizes that it is him she is looking at.

“Hey,” she says softly, as she softly smears her cheek and lips across the material of his t-shirt. “Morning.”

“Hey,” he says, gently pushing her leg down a little bit with his hand, getting it farther away from his injury. “Did you sleep okay?”

“I slept great,” she whispers, as she presses a really careful kiss to his sternum and then, noticing a small spot of her drool, she starts rubbing at the spot with the pads of her fingers. “You?”

“Pretty good,” he admits. “Ready for the day?”

“Yeah,” she says, sighing — stretching her arms and lightly groaning. “You look good in the morning.”

He tries to smile at her at that — he tries to accept the compliment like a normal person and not like a fucking psycho. He says, “Thanks.”

And then Missandei’s body jolts in surprise — as both of their ears prick up from the loud, anguished scream.

  
  
  
  


They both run down the hall in their bare feet — still wearing their sleep clothes. Missandei is slightly behind him, her pulse thrumming in her throat as her mind fights to remember her training.

Grey hesitates just the barest bit, when he stops at the Arryns’ bedroom door. They can still hear the screaming coming from the other side of the door.

Missandei is shouting, _“Lysa!_ Are you _okay?”_

Then Grey is wrenching the door open.

When Missy sees Lysa in tears, on her knees, on her bed, in her canary yellow nightgown and her long hair plaited in a braid, with Jon still asleep beside her — Missy is momentarily confused.

And then Lysa screams, “He’s _dead!_ My husband is _dead!”_

  
  
  
  
  
  



	32. OMG did Grey just lose his mind?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey and Missandei's romantic golf vacation is taking a terrible turn. Grey is stuck with a really green newbie partner. Missy is trapped in a foreign country with the future love of her life, who might actually be suffering a legit mental break. She aids him in threatening and abducting a dead man's wife. This may or may not be a good idea.

  
  
  
  
  


 

Missy wraps her arms around Lysa’s shaking shoulders and tries to compress the other woman’s outpour of emotion — telling her it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s going to be okay — as Grey silently walks over to Jon and checks for a pulse — his fingers touching Jon’s neck and then also on Jon’s wrist. As Lysa sobs, Missy holds her breath and watches as Grey blankly stares down at Jon’s peaceful face — she thinks that he must be in shock.

Through her tears, Lysa is saying that her husband was fine and happy when they went to bed. Lysa tells them nothing was amiss at all. Her face crumples as she says, “Oh my God, how am I going to tell my  _ son?” _

“We should call the police,” Missandei says softly, orienting her voice toward Grey’s stationary body. 

“What am I going to say  _ to them?” _ Lysa cries.

“Just tell them the truth,” Missy says, trying to keep her voice calm and even. “It will be okay.”

“I don’t speak Valyrian!”

“I can help.”

Grey suddenly starts moving — Missandei’s eyes tries to catch his face — and she feels handcuffed and stuck because she can’t call out to him honestly and authentically as herself, to ask him if he is okay. She just holds onto Lysa’s anguished grief, and Missy wonders if the sight of Jon is bringing back just terrible memories for him. 

She is stunned when he just exits the room.

Even now, she’s worried about blowing cover. Shakily, to Lysa, she awkwardly explains, “He’s probably going to look for a phone.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He quickly runs back into the guest bedroom and unplugs and swipes his and Missandei’s phones from the nightstand. He messily types out a code and sends it before he drops the devices on the bed and starts stripping down to nothing before he yanks on his day clothes and shoves his feet into socks. He steps into his shoes and ties them before he pockets the phones, their passports, all the pieces of identifying information that he keeps bundled all together — and then he runs downstairs. 

He goes straight to the utility drawer in the pantry and pulls out a serrated steak knife, a multitool, and duct tape. He then runs into the garage and pulls a hammer out of the tool chest. He pulls this nylon rope hanging off of a ladder and holds it tightly in his hands as he loudly runs back upstairs to the master bedroom. 

He is panting steadily from the exertion as he directs his stare to Missandei and only Missandei. He asks, “Do you remember when the staff is due back here? Did she ever say yesterday?”

She stares back at him with her eyes wide, utterly confused and bewildered. Her training still kicks in. She still answers faithfully. She says, “She didn’t say.”

He reasons that it’s probably soon, and that they don’t have much time. 

“Did you call the police?” Missandei asks.

He doesn’t answer her. He just says, “Let her go,” as he quickly starts untangling the rope. He then adds, “Go change your clothes quickly.”

She only hesitates for a split second.

And it’s enough for him to loudly shout,  _ “Now!” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


As she runs to the bedroom. Her heart is  _ pounding _ so hard in her chest that she thinks she might be on the edge of a full-blown panic attack. Her mind is screaming out this confusion and this fear and worry — as her body jumps because she hears Lysa release a frightened, high-pitched scream. She hears Lysa scream,  _ “No!”  _ and  _ “Don’t!”  _ in the other room as her own gut lurches — as she feels nauseous and her shaky hands start digging into her luggage.  

Her eyes tear up as she listens to more of Lysa’s screaming — before it stops.

She runs back to the master bedroom in pants and a shirt, in time for Grey to flash a knife at her — in time for her to see Lysa’s wet, red face crying behind a silver sheen of tape over her mouth. She is lying on the bed next to her dead husband. Her hands are tied behind her back and then also to her torso. Her legs are also cinched together, connected to her hands so that her movement is severely restricted. 

When she spots Missandei again, Lysa’s muffled screaming intensifies — snot drips out of her nose — and Missy cannot make out what Lysa is trying to scream — but she already knows what Lysa is trying to say. Lysa is pleading for help. Lysa is pleading for her life.

Grey walks into the walk-in closet and comes out with two scarves and a beach bag. He stuffs all of his items — the hammer, the rope, the tape, other things — into the bag and leaves it on the ground.

Then he says, “Grab that.”

Before he walks over to the bed — Lysa muffled screams get more agitated and her body thrashes when he lays a hand on her leg. 

And then he presses the serrated steak knife to her throat, as he holds down her head so that she doesn’t accidentally impale herself. He says to her, “Calm down. Be quiet. Or I will kill you, and then I will find your son and slit his throat, too. Understand?”

He doesn’t even wait for Lysa to signal any agreement before he yanks her body up and holds her tightly to his chest, before he repositions the knife at her ribcage. 

He starts methodically carrying her down the expansive staircase. 

Missandei doesn’t even realize she is crying, as she stares at his back in disbelief, as thick air around her continues drawing out moisture from her eyes. 

She blinks.

And then she unsteadily reaches down and grabs the beach bag.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Theoretically, how they are trained for this kind of incident is that leadership and their decision-making model is somewhat fluid. Leadership switches around according to who has the most technical expertise, experience — or just simply who is most equipped to lead in the moment. They are trained this way so that they are always primed for optimized decision-making and are constantly always assessing. If there is ever a moment where there is disagreement on who is to lead, then they should automatically default to the hierarchy, as time is often of the essence when in the field. 

Really tight teams can switch off leadership rather seamlessly and almost silently in high-stress situations, having honed the action over years of working together. Grey’s former team was like that — before he told himself that the voice in the back of his head was just emotional doubt, a fallacy — and then led the majority of them to their deaths, based on orders from leadership.

That’s a niggling fact that he is kind of contending with, right now, as he loads Lysa’s tense body into the trunk of their rental car. Ever since he came back to work, doubt has just plagued his mind. He doubts his ability to make good decisions. He doubts his ability to keep people safe. He doubts his judgement. He doubts his sanity. 

Behind him, Missandei says, “It’s too hot.”

Her voice has judgement in it. And he knows already knows that it’s too hot. He has planned to push down the back seat for airflow and also to be able to watch Lysa from the start. He opens the back door and hits the button to collapse down the seat. This way, she is obscured from other motorists, but she won’t suffocate from heat.

He attributes the friction and hard edges of his interactions with Missandei to lack of practice and also her lack of experience and expertise in this. He realizes that this is something he is just going to have to bear for the upcoming tense few hours or however long until headquarters gets back to him with directives and options.

Wordlessly, he takes the beach bag from her grasp and then he tosses it at the foot of the passenger seat. He wordlessly starts up the car — as the sound of the engine re-inspires Lysa to lose her shit again. She starts to scream through the tape over her mouth.

He swivels his head around. He waits for her to draw breath — for a pause in her ruckus. Then he calmly says to her, “You should be quieter. I’m asking you to. I don’t want to make you because you will not like how I do it.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He drives strategically aimlessly, based on his training, in order to ensure that they are not being followed. A popular misconception is that they lose a tail through evasive driving and speed. They actually lose tails by boring them to death. 

It is forty minutes in and out of city center — with Missandei constantly casting tense, scrutinizing looks at him, trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. They don’t really have the luxury of taking a sidebar so he can explain to her, in detail, what he thinks is going on. He will have to save the teaching until after this engagement fully plays out and they are safe. 

He pulls up to a motel that he had previously scouted as a solid option for a safe stopover. It is in an urban area that is dense and cloaked, in the northeast side of the city with a large immigrant population. He and Missandei stand out less here. The buildings have entrances that are open to the outdoors so they don’t have to walk through a lobby or hallways to get to a room. They can pay in cash because the owner is evading taxes and the manager is corrupt and skims off the top. 

“Why don’t you go get us a room facing south, on the second floor?” he casually suggests to Missandei. He wants a south facing room so he can see the road.

She casts him a look — pausing with her hand touching the door handle — and he will need to talk to her about this later. Her apprehension costs them time. 

He says, “Go on.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


The front office smells like cigarette smoke and stale fry oil. The curtains are see-through and filter in dusty light as she sweats, as she bleeds out anxiety and nervousness — walking up to the counter. She has to wait behind a man with body odor as he surprises her by speaking in Asshai'i to the manager behind the desk.

She learns that the air conditioning in his room is broken and he would either like a discount or for it to be fixed. 

The manager grumbles that the air conditioner was working last he checked, but he will send someone up soon — as he picks up a cellphone that is thickly wrapped in one of those old-fashioned indestructible cases. Then, into the phone, he tells the person on the other line to go to room 3B to check the air.

When it’s Missandei’s turn to step up to the counter, the manager is struck by her appearance — by how pretty she is but also by the color of her skin and her ethnicity — and she feels dread that he’s going to remember her because she and Grey are in the midst of committing just a bunch of crimes together. 

She shakily pulls out her wallet, hides her fake identification from him like how she was taught to, and then lays a few bills onto the sticky, yellowing counter. 

He jolts in surprise when she speaks to him in Asshai’i.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey is standing outside of the car and eating salted roasted peanuts out of his palm when she walks back up to him with a motel room key clenched tightly in her hand. The back windows are cracked behind him, for airflow. It is viciously hot outside today.

He gives her a dead smile when she gets within speaking distance. He raises his palm. He says, “Want some? We haven’t gotten breakfast yet. I found these in your purse.”

They are the nuts from the packets that the flight attendant had given them on their flight. He was sleeping next to her because he was exhausted so she took his packet for him and stored it in her bag for later, just in case he got hungry and wanted a snack.

“You looked in my purse,” she states, keeping her voice even.

“Yeah,” he says smoothly. “I just wanted to see if maybe you had brought something from home in there.” 

He had wanted to see if she had accidentally fucked up and left a piece of identifying information in there from her true identity — like a parking receipt, like a restaurant business card, like a used notepad with indentations from her previous writings.

She knows that there is nothing in there that could incriminate them. She is really paranoid about that. She goes over the contents of her bag nearly every day.  

She can’t tell if he is pissed about the peanuts or not. She thinks that peanuts from their flight is okay. But maybe she is wrong.

“Alright, what room are we in?”

“2D.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She expects him to untie Lysa’s feet so that Lysa can walk up to their motel room and make it look somewhat naturalistic. But surprisingly, Grey pops open the trunk, looks down at Lysa’s sweat-soaked face and body, and says, “I’m going to carry you again now. If you are good and stay still, I won’t have to kill you, okay?”

This is the moment that Lysa decides to call his bluff — she is mildly claustrophobic and that, coupled with the high stress of being abducted by people she previously understood were her husband’s friends — and her husband is dead now — well, she starts to scream and thrash around again, when he touches his fingers to her arm. 

The car jostles from Lysa’s renewed panic — Missandei takes a quick look around and sees that they are alone in the parking lot. Grey parked on the other side of the building, butting up close to the side. No motel room has a view of them. 

Missandei can’t help but let out a surprised gasp when she sees and hear Grey suddenly reach out and grab Lysa by the neck. She sees him squeeze her neck hard — and she sees Lysa shove her tear-filled gaze at Missandei, trying to plead with her — before Grey slams Lysa’s head back down to the floor of the trunk. 

Missandei flinches — and then she turns her face away.

Lysa’s muffled screaming devolves into a whimper, as she sniffs loudly and swings her head to the side in pain.  

Grey says, “Seriously, shut up, okay?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey makes quick work of carrying Lysa’s rigid but quiet body up to the second floor — no one sees them. 

And Missandei can feel his strong energy just pointed at her, as her shaking hands fumbles with the motel room key, as she struggles to unlock the door. 

She’s about to nervously tell him that the door is old and the key is stiff in the lock — when it miraculously turns — and then she is twisting the knob open as he kicks the door the rest of the way open. He has the beach bag dangling from his elbow.

She sees him walk in and drop Lysa’s body onto the bed. He grabs her by the wrists with one hand and then  _ flips  _ her over so that she is on her stomach.

Missandei’s heart lurches when he pulls out the steak knife again — when he points it down toward Lysa’s body.

“No! Stop!  _ Don’t do it!” _

The words are just carelessly out of her mouth before she can even  _ think _ about them — her face goes unbearably hot as he orients his gaze to her. He face is blank but she knows that he is displeased. 

And then wordlessly, he starts to cut the ties on Lysa’s arms. He leaves her feet tied. 

Missandei holds her breath — just unsure and bewildered.

And then he flips Lysa back over. He looms over her.

Lysa is crying again — and she is using her freed, welted hands to try and fight him off — she is trying to hit and scratch him in the face — as he quietly and soothingly asks her to stop it.

He easily grabs her sore wrists and pulls them over her head as she continues to hopelessly sob again. He grabs the bundle of rope that is sitting innocuously on the bed and he efficiently ties her wrists together — over her head. 

And then he loosely ties her hands to the bed — so that she has some movement, but she is still stuck close to it.  

Grey sits on the corner of the bed after that and patiently watches as Lysa somewhat calms back down and succumbs to just how  _ trapped _ she currently is. 

Then he reaches out and lightly slaps her in the face — he says, “I’m going to take that tape off your mouth so you can have some water. Don’t scream or else I’m going to hit you in the face really hard, okay?”

Missandei is having a hard time controlling her own emotions — watching him  _ do this _ . Her eyes are tearing up against the expressed wishes of her brain as she watches him gently and gingerly start peeling off the duct tape from Lysa’s mouth.

Without looking at Missandei, he says, “Why don’t you go back down to the lobby and buy us some bottles of water and some snacks. Why don’t you also move the car around to the front of building before you come back?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She roughly wipes the tears from her face as she runs back down the stairs, as she wonders, in a panic, whether or not she is meant to move the car first or whether or not she is meant to get water and snacks first. Her heart is jackhammering against her ribcage as she just wishes and  _ wishes so hard _ that she was just at home with her dad or home doing her normal job and embroiled in her normal routine and not  _ doing this.  _

Her mind just _ screams out _ and it is telling her that she did not sign up for this at all, that this is not at all what she fucking  _ meant _ when she told them that she wanted greater responsibility. She didn’t fucking mean that she wanted to be _ responsible _ for  _ someone’s life _ in this way. 

She is starting to hyperventilate — and she knows that she needs to slow down or else she will pass out and he will be  _ so mad _ at her if she does that. She presses her palm hard to her chest, as she starts to count to four — pulling big breathes in and out — and she banishes these thoughts of every terrible thing that she has heard people say about him — things that she adamantly told herself were not at all true and that the rest of them were all fucking heartless and callous. He is not broken. He is not irrevocably damaged. He is not mentally impaired. He is not dangerous. He is good at his job. He is really smart. He is really talented. He is a caring person. He is capable of empathy — she has seen it. She has seen his goodness.

When she goes to grab her forgotten purse from inside the car — she digs inside it for her wallet again. And then she realizes that she is missing her phone.

Because he took it.

She has no way to contact home.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Her eyes are somewhat dry and clear again, when she despondently floats back up to the room. She has to knock on the door because he locked it behind her. Hot air whooshes against her face before she gets to stare at him again. 

He says, “Snacks? Water?” with expectation.

She mutely hands him all of her cold, dripping bottles — she got four — and a bunch of crinkly packages of Valyrian corn chips. 

He takes them into his arms and drops all but one water bottle onto the bed, at Lysa’s tied feet. 

He cracks open the bottle of water. Lysa’s face is marked from where the duct tape was. He smoothly sucks down a sip of the water to prevent it from overflowing in his grasp, before he orients it at Lysa’s face. She doesn’t want to drink at all. He is kind of insistent. She continues to refuse. She is alternating between avoiding eye contact with him in fear — and trying to make eye contact with Missandei.

Missy feels such shame right now.

Lysa softly says, “Please  _ help me.” _

Grey interrupts. He snaps his fingers in her face, making her release out a soft, fearful whimper. Then he says, “Hey, don’t talk to her. Talk to  _ me.”  _

And then he pulls out the steak knife and holds it against her throat again, as she shuts her eyes tightly and tries to just sink into the bed.

“Okay, so you’re going to have a drink of water so you don’t die or get diarrhea  _ right now,”  _ Grey says conversationally. “Don’t worry. I just tested the water out for you. It’s not poisoned. It’s all good and clean. Anyway, after you have a nice drink, you’re gonna tell me why you killed your husband, okay?” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


 


	33. Grey and Missy are in deep shit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey continues terrifying the shit out of the future love of his life — and also his prisoner. Missandei is holding out hope that her man is not batshit crazy right now, leading her down a path of darkness and death. Joke's on her, darkness and death are probably going to happen anyway, whether or not she follows Grey.

  
  
  
  


 

He was actually the one who mentored her and lectured her at length on the best techniques for getting information out of people. He was actually the one who told her that threats of violence and intimidation don’t work well at all. He taught her that people will say all sorts of things under duress. It is hard to get a gauge on a consistent baseline.

He was the one who stopped short of bringing up his own personal experience with Bolton, when he emphatically told her that torture is scientifically proven to be a really poor interrogation technique. He was the one who encouraged her to continue honing her relationship-building and rapport-building skills with people because, he told her, that is the best way to draw out information from people.

So she doesn’t know what to make of it — or how to reduce the growing sense of horror she feels — as she continues to bear witness to the dehumanizing things he is doing and saying to Lysa.

He keeps force-feeding Lysa water — which she has to drink or else he just dribbles it down her nose, causing her to gasp loudly and cough, her body spasming against her restraints.

He keeps asking her the same question — why she killed her husband. She keeps sobbing and brokenly telling him that she didn’t kill her husband. She keeps rhetorically asking, out loud, why she would kill the father of her son? She keeps telling him that Jon was old and his health was failing. She woke up, and he was already dead beside her.

“Likely story,” he says, as he points the steak knife at her. “You oversaw and gave him all his drinks and food yesterday — why?”

“Because he’s my husband and that’s how I took care of him,” Lysa whispers, and not for the first time. And then she hesitantly adds, “Doesn’t your wife do the same for you?”

“Uh, not consistently. That would be weird and sexist, and I ain’t that sexist.” He swivels his head around to look at Missandei’s expression — and as usual, she cannot hide a thing from him at all. Her feelings are very clear on her face. He turns his attention back to Lysa. “Must be a generational thing.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He must be trying to exhaust Lysa or something — and it’s an endurance test for Missandei, too. She has transitioned from hovering standing to resigned sitting at a small circular table next to the bed. She keeps trying to skirt the middle of her feelings. She is trying to shut them down and pay attention to her training — she is trying to go through the mental checklist and constantly assess, like her dad was telling her to. She is also trying to not numb herself so much that the pain of another human being just doesn’t _resonate_ in her.

After long bouts of hesitation, embarrassment, and fear, Lysa finally admits to him that she needs to use the toilet — making Missandei realize that the woman _they abducted_ didn’t even get a chance to brush her hair, wash her face, or use the bathroom at all before she found her husband dead and was pulled from her home.

In response to Lysa’s confession, Grey says, “So go.”

Lysa’s eyes tear up — and she is confused. She carefully whispers out a response that is so measured and near-silent that Missandei has to strain to hear it. Lysa says, “I don’t understand.”

“You need to go,” Grey recaps. “So just go.”

“In the bed?” she whispers.

“I mean, you don’t really have access to the bathroom right now, do you?” he tells her. “You haven’t earned it yet because you haven’t told me why you killed your husband. Like, why didn’t you just ask for a divorce if you wanted to be rid of him? Murder seems awfully drastic.”

 _“P-please,”_ she whispers, as her body starts to tremble.

“Please what?” Grey says, playing dumb, pointing the knife at her again, making her flinch and squeeze her eyes shut.

“Are you going to kill me?” she whispers.

“Probably eventually,” he says.

 _“Joe,”_ Missandei cuts in. “Come on.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He tries to ignore her like how he has consistently been doing, but this time, she resists being ignored. She actually gets up from her seat, walks the short distance to him, and she lays her hand on his shoulder to get his attention. She casts a quick glance at Lysa before averting her eyes to the ceiling. And then Missandei risks.

She keeps her voice quiet and gentle, as she briefly touches his cheek with the side of her thumb. She tells him, “This isn’t you.”

He swings his eyes up to look at her for a moment. Their gazes connect — and for the briefest moment, she sees him in there. She sees the person she has gotten to know really well and has come to care for so much. His eyes soften and the corners of his mouth droop down into a frown —

Before the wall comes back down, and he blanks it all out.

And then he scoffs and lightly knocks her hand off his body, waving the knife dangerously close to her face, too. She automatically takes a small step back as her heart lurches at the flash of metal.

Then he says, “Hey, please sit your ass down and continue being useless while I talk to our guest, okay?”

She recoils away from him.

  
  
  
  
  
  


For the next several minutes, she wages this epic inner war within herself. Words and phrases and philosophies and methodologies conflict with one another in her gut and brain as she is trying to figure out what the right thing is. She can hear Lysa begging him to let her to use the toilet, as Missy sweats underneath the loud air conditioner and the pressure that she is under, as she tries to figure out which pearl of wisdom she’s been given by others is right.

When Missandei dated one too many assholes in college who only liked her for her body and cheated on her a few too many times — Dany got fed up with it and told Missandei that when someone shows her their true colors — _believe them._

When Missandei was too slow to keep up with her brothers on their bikes and bit it hard going down a hill — spraining her wrist — her dad brutally chewed out her older brothers and took their bikes away, creating this resentment because in her brothers' points of view, all they did was relent and let her come along with them because they felt sorry for her. They learned that day that pitying her and being nice to her in that way was going to get them in trouble because she is weak and slow. She learned that day that tattling to someone more powerful than the enemy she is currently contending with works. It took her years before she was able to empathize with the position she put her brothers in constantly.

Her training ingrained her obedience. She is loyal to her adopted country, above all else. She is meant to work for the greater good. She is meant to preserve life. She serves the organization. She was taught to follow orders always — from all of her superiors, including him. She has figured out that she is forever the least experienced and the least qualified in every decision-making model. She has learned that what she feels and what she thinks is right does not matter to Drogo — and she had thought that it mattered to Grey, but maybe it doesn’t when what she feels conflicts with how he feels.

She can’t remove their personal relationship from this — and she can tangibly see why so many people have said that it’s a real bad idea to sleep with a coworker. She is really not supposed to, but she is applying the terrible fight they had in their personal relationship to this current situation — the brutal way he shut her down and told her she is needy just because she wants to care for him. She is applying the way they have sex with each other to this current situation, the way his eyes glint in victory and sexualized gratification and the way his body relaxes when he does the final tug on the knot at her wrist. She is remembering the way her vocalization — the groaning and the pleading and the begging — draws out greater engagement from him during sex — how he seems to get off on it in his own way.

She stands up from her seat. She slams her hand on the table to demand his attention.

She says, “You need to untie her and let her go to the bathroom. This is inhumane.”

“You need to shut up,” he easily throws back.

  
  
  
  
  
  


It is completely the wrong thing to do — she knows this — she knows that they are already in deep shit and she is making this worst —

But the fucking alternative is to just do _nothing_ and to let this play out — and to what end? The stakes are higher here, and it’s not as simple as him getting hit in the face by a sex worker and needing to go to the hospital for a shot and a bandage. They can’t walk away that easily _from this._

She starts to reason with him — in a slightly argumentative way. She starts to break protocol, because she thinks she has to. There are extenuating circumstances, because he is compromised right now.

She realizes that she thinks he is compromised.

She says, “I will go in the bathroom with her. I will watch her. Nothing will happen. I swear.”

“I honestly don’t get why you are so hung up on this,” he says, twirling the knife around in the air. “She is fine. She’s faking. She doesn’t really need to go.”

 _“I need to go!”_ Lysa shouts.

“Shut up,” he throws back at Lysa. And then to Missandei, with just a shit ton of condescension, he says, “She’s obviously trying to distract us from the fact that she murdered her husband. I don’t get why you don’t see this.”

 _“Who_ are _you people?”_ Lysa asks, crying again.

“Okay, _you people?”_ Grey says. “That’s a little racist, Lys.”

This is when one of the phones in his inner pocket starts to buzz. His brows go up in relief and delight — Missandei is staring at him like she doesn’t even _know_ this person — and then, holding the knife, he gives them a just-a-minute finger and checks the screen.

Then he says, “Oh, hey, this is important. I need to get this.”

And then he lightly tosses the knife at Missandei, who basically internally screams, shrieks out loud, and then just lets the knife drop down to the carpet.

He sighs. He says, “You were supposed to catch it, babe.”

On his way out the door to grab the call, he leans over real quick to give her a kiss on the cheek.

Missandei does a full body flinch and then just forces herself to rigidly accept his kiss, as Lysa watches. This is really fucking convincing. They are totally in love. Awesome.

  
  
  
  
  
  


The second he is out the door, Lysa starts sobbing again — her tears have dried out and she has nothing left to cry except for the sound of anguish. It hurts Missy’s heart as Missy unties the loop keeping Lysa attached to the bed. Her hands are shaking — her body is actually shaking violently.

“It’s okay,” Missy says soothingly, helping to ease Lysa into sitting position. “We’ll get you to the toilet together, okay?”  

“Who are you!” Lysa shouts, even as she allows Missandei to help her swing her tied legs off of the bed.

Missy bypasses that question. She just says, “I can’t untie you. He will be so pissed if I do. But I can help carry you into the toilet and help sit you on it. It will be easy, I promise.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


There’s a time difference, so it’s really early in the morning in King’s Landing — with Drogo only _just_ getting notified of Grey’s message. Drogo is still in his apartment, getting dressed in a rush, telling the woman that he met in a bar, who is lying in his bed, that she needs to leave real fast because he has a work emergency right now.

Drogo mutters sorry as he basically shoves her out the door, as Grey impatiently waits and grinds his teeth on the other end of the secure line.

Drogo is grabbing his car keys and is stepping into his shoes as he tells Grey, “I just woke up. I have no idea what is going on. _Tell me_ what is going on.”

Grey tells Drogo that Jon Arryn is dead. His wife killed him. The local authorities have probably found the body right now and an investigation will probably be launched. All of his and Missandei’s clothes are still at the house and the house staff will report that they were staying with the Arryns. Grey tells Drogo that they need an emergency extraction. They need a flight out now. They also need a plane ticket for Lysa.   

  
  
  
  
  
  


Lysa is back in bed, with her bladder empty, by the time he returns to the room. Missy’s heart is throbbing as she looks at him expectantly, because she knows who must have been on the other side of his call.

He doesn’t explain it to her. He just swipes up the car keys from the table and then nods to the knife that is still on the ground. He says, “Watch her. I need to go see somebody about cleaning up the mess that this fucking murderer made. Be back in about . . . an hour? Maybe two. I’ll try to find breakfast, too. Or lunch, I guess. What do you feel like eating?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


His heart is pounding hard in the heat and his gut is just a wreck, as he leaves Missandei in the room with Lysa Arryn and walks to the car, as he mentally walks through all the pieces that he tried to put into place — as he tries to figure out if there was something that he may have missed in the preparation. There was just _no time_ to go over this beforehand because he thought that this sort of terribleness would not happen for _a while._ He never thought that he’d have to work with her in _this way._ He thought that he would be able to sequester this part of himself away from her indefinitely.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“Are you okay?” Missandei asks softly. And then when Lysa weakly yanks against her restraints, Missy smiles grimly and says, “Ah, yes. I suppose you’ve had better days.”

“I don’t understand what is happening right now,” Lysa tells her.

“To be honest? Neither do I.” Missandei’s shoulders sink a little bit.

“Then _why_ are you letting him do this _to me?”_ Lysa asks brokenly.

Missy sighs. And then she says, “Um, this is going to sound really stupid — but I tend to just go along with what he wants.”

This results in a long pause — and Missy is thinking that she is just a fucking _idiot_ right now, on more than one count.

But then Lysa says, “I can understand that, too. I was the same — with my husband. He — he ran the entire household.”

“Did you really kill him, Lysa?” Missandei asks.

The other woman’s face crumples. Her lips quiver.

And then she says, “He was just an awful husband — a really awful father. I just — I need to protect my son. I would do _anything_ for my son.”

“I know you love your son very much,” Missy says softly. “You talk about him a lot.”

“Is he going to kill me? Your husband? But _why?”_

“I don’t know.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He meets her out in public, in a busy quad of shops and cafes. He sits at a small table with a ceramic cup and saucer in front of him, with his eyes obscured behind dark sunglasses. He doesn’t express interest or surprise or anything resembling recognition, when she sits down across from him with a bag hooked over her shoulder. Her face is obscured, behind a headdress.

In Valyrian, he tells her that it’s been a while — a few years.

She tells him that she really didn’t expect to hear from him at all — not today. She tells him what he already knows — which is that he must be in some deep shit.

He readily and casually agrees with that. Yeah, he’s in some shit right now.

She asks him how Daenerys is — and to please pass along her regards.

In the Common Tongue, he mutters, “Will do.” And then he asks her if she has a present for him.

She hands over the bag.

From the weight of it, he knows that there is a gun in there. Valyria has strict gun laws, he can’t just buy one here. He also does not have the contacts here to procure a gun in his typical way. He has to call in this favor.

She tells him to be careful and to try to stay alive.

He asks if she doesn’t already know the outcome of today. Can’t she already see it?

  
  
  
  
  
  


He leans over and peers into the dead and pale face of Jon Arryn. They have already torn apart the room — finding nothing important or conspicuous missing. They have already torn through the guest bedroom, finding only luggage and clothing — a man and a woman’s. They have already talked to the staff, who merely just told them what they already know, which is that when the staff arrived for work in the morning, Ser Arryn was already dead and the lady was already gone, along with their house guests. The staff reported calling the police right away — and here they are. That is it. That is all they know. They do not know the name of the guests. They do not know where they came from. They were a husband and a wife — both dark-skinned.

“Let’s call him,” Alyn says, walking back into the room. “See if he’ll be up for a renegotiation of our contract now that things have deviated a little bit.” Alyn is grinning, already pulling his phone up to his ear.

Harry doesn’t particularly like working with Alyn — Alyn is irritatingly sloppy. But he is Valyrian.

“Boss?” Alyn says into the phone. “Yeah, she’s gone. Probably taken by the two agents. Would you like us to go look for her?”

After Alyn hangs up the phone with their employer — who agreed to the new terms — they walk down the staircase and past the living room, where two staff members, a maid and a cook, lie in a pool of their own blood. Harry predicts that a gardener or a groundskeeper will find them soon enough.

As he steps into the sun, he predicts that it will likely be another half hour, before the house is filled with local law enforcement.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 


	34. Are Grey and Missy about to die?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey continues trying to do his job to the best of his abilities. The problem is that everyone thinks he is crazy. The future love of his life has never met a woman in peril that she hasn't wanted to save, so that makes things complicated for her and her man. Bronn wants to know why he was pulled out of bed just because his coworker is sucking at his job. Harry is having just the roughest day because he just wants to do his job but he is paired up with the most unpredictable Valyrian nutjob.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei listens as Lysa easily confesses that she never wanted to marry Jon at all — that Lysa was never attracted to him and only married him for the stability that he provided. She tells Missandei she was desperate for her father’s approval of Jon’s family name and pedigree. She tells Missandei that she was young and stupid and plagued with low self-esteem. She also earnestly thought that she would grow to love him because that’s what people told her would happen.

Lysa tells Missandei that Jon had good timing. He awkwardly wooed her during a vulnerable time in her life, when she was feeling especially alone and unworthy. She tells Missandei that she was also in her thirties and just desperate to have a baby and be a mother because that is what she is meant to do on this earth. She was worried about time running out for herself so she made all of these concessions and all of these excuses even though a million red flags were blaring in her face. 

Lysa tells Missandei that all of her friends wondered why and tried to dissuade her from marrying such an ugly old man. Lysa tells Missandei about Jon’s predisposition towards violence, and how she resolutely ignored all of the signs for years because once she became pregnant, she just needed to make it work with him. She told herself that he would never hurt their child because how can anyone hurt their own child?

Lysa tells Missandei she had been gravely wrong.

Lysa tells Missandei that she would’ve beared the punishment of a despotic bully because she made these marriage vows and she doesn’t believe in breaking vows — but she could not abide by what that man did to her son. She tells Missandei that the Arryn family is powerful and has the kind of influence that people like them can’t even imagine. Divorce would have ensured that she would never see her son again. Jon would have taken Robin away. Jon would have used his considerable influence to bankrupt and ruin her — and then turn her son against her.

“That’s why I had to do it,” Lysa whispers, her voice pleading for understanding. “I just had no choice.”

“You understand that you could go to prison for this?” Missandei says softly, frowning.

“I told you,” Lysa says. “I would do _ anything  _ to protect my son.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


At headquarters, Drogo stiffly tells them what Grey is requesting. Drogo tells them all that he thinks that they need to talk to their embassy in Valyrian and prime the office to receive their two officers and Lysa Arryn as soon as possible. Drogo tells them that he needs they need to push paperwork asap, to make Grey and Missandei employees of that office on the books. 

“Wait a minute, just wait a fucking minute,” Bronn says in irritation — pissed that he was pulled into work on his day off for this shit. He crosses his arms and stares Drogo in the face. “You’re telling us we should obstruct the legal processes of a notoriously insular country by housing someone who might have committed a murder with our cocks out like fucking cowboys — you are saying we should just come out and admit to Valyria that we are running covert operations within their borders ‘cause they just  _ love that shit —  _  all because Torgo went off the fucking rails  _ again?”  _ Bronn pauses for all of one second — and no one interjects in that second — so he explodes with, “How many indulgences is that PTSD dickless asshole going to  _ get  _ just because he has a  _ hunch?  _ Holy shit. When are y’all gonna give me license to do whatever the  _ fuck _ I want, just because I have a  _ feeling?” _

As Drogo glares heat at Bronn but says nothing because he always unproductively gets in such shit for saying things in times like these — Tyrion delicately clears his throat. He says, “Okay, so Bronn is a no on this. Noted.”

“Do we currently have anyone on the ground in the Freehold right now?” Selmy asks. 

“No,” Arya says. “The closest is Sandor — he’s in Lhazosh. But that’s half a day out probably — and he’s not free right now. He’s engaged. It would be costly to divert him.”

“Daenerys, what are you thinking?” Selmy asks.

Before she can open her mouth to answer, Drogo interrupts with, “Missy is there with him right now, too.”

Dany’s eyes flash at him — angry that he is trying to be pettily manipulative — annoyed that he is implying that Grey alone does not warrant her full concern. 

“I  _ remember,” _ Dany says heatedly.

  
  
  
  
  


Alyn is loitering a little bit, taking a respite from the hard work of . . . standing around like a poncy piece of work, sucking down half a cigarette outside of a convenience store as if he needs a break from the three hours of work he’s had to do so far. Fucking Valyrians.

The car is sweltering. Harry is sweating underneath his clothes. He spends all of three minutes clutching the steering wheel and going over what he knows. He will not lose an extra day to this, because in essence, his fee would get cut in half. They don’t paid for time worked, but for the results. He has repeatedly  _ reminded _ the Valyrian bastard that whatever opening they have, to just take it and put the Westerosi agents down and then get out with Lysa Arryn as quickly as possible. He doesn’t want incidents. He would like to be on an airplane by nightfall. They are already behind schedule. He hates this climate — too humid.

Harry checks his phone. The tracker on Arryn will get them as close as 30 yards. That’s enough to narrow it down to one or two buildings. The male agent is highly trained so their best shot is to just kill on sight. He didn’t want to take this job because he prefers not to engage with those who are highly trained, but Connington forced his hand. 

He shifts uncomfortably in his seat, with his shirt and pants sticking to his sweaty skin. He pokes his head out of the window. To his partner-for-the-day, he says, “You done soon?”

Alyn mutters something dismissive in Valyrian, waving Harry off before flicking cigarette ash at him. And then Alyn mutters, “You Company men, so rush rush rush. So work work work. What is the point of life if you can’t stop and enjoy moments?”

Harry fucking  _ hates _ this guy. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


He comes back with a crusty loaf of bread, sliced cured meat that is leaking out oil due to the hot sun, and a smelly runny, melted wedge of cheese that has glued together the wax paper encasing it. She was right about him. He really  _ does _ love this stinky shit. 

He lays out all of his new stuff on the table, including his new gun, as he swipes a piece of bread through the gooey, warm cheese.

Missandei says, “Holy shit,” referring to the gun. She knows how strict the gun laws are in Valyria. She can only imagine what he has done to procure one.

He says, “Relax,” as he nudges the bread to her, signalling to her that she should eat something. “You act like you haven’t seen one of these before. Did you two have a nice chat while I was gone? So, did she tell you how she killed her husband and why?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She can’t take this anymore. She pulls him into the bathroom, flicks on the overhead fan, and then urgently whispers to him, orienting them so that he still has a good look at Lysa. He has his new gun hanging loosely from one hand raised over his head, braced against the door jamb, as he continues eating a craggly sandwich of meat, cheese, and bread that he has made for himself. 

Very quietly, Missandei tells him that Lysa  _ did _ kill her husband. She was a battered wife. She was desperate. She was worried about her son. She really felt it was her only means to escape the situation she was in. Missy tells him it was a shortsighted plan — that Lysa believed that because she poisoned her husband slowly, that his death would be ruled an accident.

“Hm, interesting,” Grey says thoughtfully, chewing through his food. “Good job getting that information.”

Missandei stares up at him, pushing down the slight embarrassment she feels over his condescending tone, also pushing down the embarrassment she feels, over taking so long to figure out his what his intentions were with every shitty thing he has done today. She understands that he manipulated her the entire day and played her feelings and her empathy because he didn’t trust her with the truth. She understands that he thinks she is a shitty liar, so he just used her as a tool to meet his unspoken goals.

She whispers to him, “We need to hand her over to the local authorities and let the due process play out.”

“Oh no,” Grey says — in his normal voice volume so that Lysa can hear him. “We are not going to let her go.”

“You  _ can’t _ just interfere with due process —”

“We can when the asset is valuable enough,” he interjects, cutting her off. And then he pushes off the door jamb. He walks back into the main room, as Lysa’s wide eyes avidly tracks him and continuously swipes to the gun in his hand. “You’re not just some rich guy’s bored housewife, are you?” he says to Lysa. “That’s funny. You even had  _ me _ overlooking you for a while there.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They all know that they do not have enough information to make a decision on this — whether or not to divert resources, whether or not to open the organization up to really fraught tensions with Valyria, whether or not this is as urgent as the SOS message that Grey sent five hours ago led them to initially believe.  

Bronn is a strict no because he thinks Grey is fucking nuts, and he doesn’t see much point in risking more lives in the course of listening to  _ an insane man _ say  _ insane things. _

Drogo is a strict yes because he doesn’t think Grey is fucking nuts at all. He used to be Grey’s partner. He used to work and live and breathe the same air as Grey twenty-four-seven. He used to watch that guy painstakingly prepare and deeply consider all of his moves before he makes them.

Everyone else thinks that Drogo’s judgement is completely colored by his personal feelings for Grey. Everyone else thinks that Drogo has exhibited a lot of leeway-giving, when it comes to Grey. None of them say this out loud to Drogo.

The rest of them sway back and forth between the extremes of Bronn and Drogo. Grey could be just fucking losing his mind in Valyria. Or they risk losing years worth of work and labor because they are hesitating.

So Tyrion does what he does best. He proposes a middle-ground solution that is not actually a solution at all — but more a means to buy more time. He suggests, “We should talk to Missandei. It seems that the concern is clear here — we don’t know whether or not to trust Grey’s judgement, as it has been inconsistent as of late. We are not there on the ground with them to know if what he is saying is right. But Missandei is. Why not ask her?”

“Oh, great,” Bronn grumbles. “Sure. Let’s ask the president of Torgo’s fan club to give us her two cents on whether that fucker is  _ batshit.”  _ He looks to Drogo. “I hope you’re happy.”

Drogo frowns. And then he calmly says, “Fuck you. You’re an asshole.”  

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei refuses to let this go — she reaches out and grabs his wrist and tugs on it, to get his attention. He gently removes his hand from her grasp and he thinks about all of the fucking  _ mistakes _ he has made, that has resulted in them being here, doing  _ this. _ A subordinate officer is trained to not overstep like this. She already voiced her concerns to him. He has heard what she thinks. He does not agree with her. His experience and his sense for this supersedes hers. So they must move forward with what he thinks is best. He has already called it in. They are already waiting for word from headquarters, authorizing them to move Arryn. He already collected the information he needs for assessment, with her help, to arrive at this conclusion. 

They do not  _ have time _ to fucking have an entire  _ discussion  _ about this where he leads her from point to point like she is  _ a child  _ on her  _ first day  _ on the job. She has been doing this shit for  _ years now _ and she should just know by now. They do not even have the fucking  _ luxury _ of having an entire conversation about this in front of  _ the asset.  _

_ This _ is why they are not supposed to sleep with one another. She thinks that their personal relationship is a good enough reason for her to constantly challenge his authority. 

One of the phones ring in his pocket — a near-silent buzz. He temporarily puts his sandwich down directly on the grimy-looking tabletop, as he picks out her device. And then after answering it with a, “Hello,” and a pause — he holds out the phone to her.

And with blank eyes, he says, “It’s for you.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Harry hangs back near the door as Alyn smoothly leans against the front desk counter and talks to the clerk in Valyrian. Connington had mocked him when he expressed that he would do this job on his own — no need to split the fee for something so straightforward. Connington had asked him if he’s even ever stepped foot in Valyria.

It certainly makes sense now. He doesn’t look Valyrian at all. He doesn’t speak Valyrian. The people all look at him with either mildly curiosity or mild aversion. 

“Has not seen any dark-skinned persons traveling with a white woman,” Alyn reports back to Harry, after leaving the counter. “But suggested the next motel over. Apparently run by foreigners. They are all unscrupulous cheats, you know. This is why we need stricter immigration laws.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She walks into the bathroom, turns on the fan, and shuts the door to get absolute privacy — mostly from Lysa. 

When she gets on the phone, Tyrion immediately tells her that she is on speakerphone. He tells her that she is also talking to Daenerys, Barristan, Bronn, Arya, and Drogo. His voice then lilts up a little bit, and with a touch of grim humor, he asks, “How is it going over there?”

She resists sighing. She just tries to match his tone. She says, “Oh, you know . . . really good.” She is still a real dork that is terrible at comebacks, especially in tense situations.

Nevertheless, Tyrion politely chuckles. And then he gets right to it. He says, “We know you don’t have a lot of time. Grey wants authorization and support, to transport Lysa Arryn to King’s Landing because he thinks she is a worthy asset to the operation. Doing so would cost us considerably, in manpower, financially, and politically. We want to make the right decision here — we want to be able to support you two — but we are concerned. How is he?”

She starts at that. Because this is strange. She clarifies — she asks, “My partner?”

“Yes. Him,” Tyrion says. “He has been . . . a bit erratic since coming back to work. We want to support him —  _ of course we do —  _ but we also have a responsibility to all of the men and women who would be affected by the decisions we make today — including  _ you, _ Missandei. And you are currently closest to him. Do you think that he is . . . compromised?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Alyn behaves in a different way, with the foreign motel manager. Alyn holds a gun right to the man’s forehead and then watches as the man starts to cry and sputter out spit, as he starts to promise Alyn the entire world — mostly money, all the money he has. 

Alyn asks about two dark-skinned foreigners and a white woman — have they been spotted here?

The manager sobs and continues begging for his life, as Alyn hits the man in the forehead with the barrel of the gun. He repeats his question. He tells the man that he doesn’t care about the man’s family. 

The man gasps out that he hasn’t see two foreigners with a white woman. There was just — there was just one woman, with dark skin. She speaks Asshai’i. She has curly hair. 

He raises his shaky hand up in the air, hoving it over his face. He tells Alyn she is about that tall. 

Alyn asks which room she is staying in.

He tells Alyn that she is in room 2D.

And then Alyn laughs loudly and tells the man thank you — as he lifts his gun from the man’s face. It would actually be too loud to shoot the man. It would give the agents warning. 

So he pulls out a knife handle from his pants pocket and flicks the blade open before he slowly slides it into the man’s stomach. 

Alyn says, “Shh,” as he presses his hand over the man’s mouth and looks into his shocked eyes. Alyn tells the man that it does not matter if there is one less pig in the world. The man doesn’t scream as he dies — just cries — but one never knows how people will react to being killed.

Harry watches this from the doorway, frowning. He thinks, again, that the Valyrian is just sloppy. 

Outside of the lobby door, Harry looks at Alyn. He quietly says, “I think we have about fifteen minutes at most, before someone finds his body and calls the police.” He is annoyed and displeased over this, over how this job was just pointlessly made difficult because his partner is a fucking psychopath. “Remember, shoot to kill on-sight,” he says, to Alyn’s smiling face. “Nothing fancy. Just kill them. Got it?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Alyn says, already walking away from Harry. “Who do you think you are? The boss of me?” Alyn actually doesn’t understand why he couldn’t have just done this job on his own, why he had to be paired with a slow, not-handsome old man who doesn’t look like he exercises enough.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei’s heart throbs steadily in her chest, burning, as she wades through long silences — as she takes the time to think — as everyone on the other end patiently waits for her to process through what is asked of her. 

She thinks about how his voice sounded in her head, right before he pulled his arm back and slammed his hand in her face. She thinks that he always has such  _ great reasons _ for every bizarre thing that he does. She wishes that she had known him better before that terrible thing that happened to him, because then she could compare the two versions of him and track the consistency or the inconsistency.

She thinks about the bleak lessons he keeps trying to impart on her — that people don’t change and that people aren’t actually as good as they would like to believe — that people are often motivated by their own self-interests.

She thinks to the long hours she has spent in massage parlors with him, and how it was during those long hours, that her feelings for him just kept growing and growing.

She also keeps thinking to sex. She keeps thinking about his face — his eyes — his stare — the way he touches her. And also the way he tied her down and then pushed her out after they were done. She keeps telling herself that she cannot use this information in her decision-making. She can’t use how they have sex as a reason to not trust him right now. It is not fair — it is not fair.

She also keeps going back to the fact that a woman’s life is on the line right now — and she can’t take that lightly. She also keeps thinking about her own failures — her inability to do certain aspects of her job well enough, forcing him to always compensate for her because he cares about her. Missandei also thinks about how Yiantha is pregnant and in jail right now, because she kept going back to a man she loved, but who was clearly no good for her.  

God, she  _ needs _ to separate her personal relationship with him from  _ this. _

“Missandei?” 

And it’s Daenerys’ voice. So Missy also remembers how Dany told her to not to mess with him. Because nothing good would come from it.

Missandei realizes that she is likely killing her personal relationship with him on the spot, right now, as she says, “I think he’s compromised. I have been worried about his judgement.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


When she exits out the bathroom — slowly and sluggishly — he already knows what she has told them. His heart seizes and clenches over it — because he honestly did not expect this outcome. He actually thought that she knew him — like, he kind of thought that she knew him better than this. 

He also thought that she was the one of the few people who believed that he isn’t crazy. 

“We have to turn her over to the local authorities,” she quietly tells him. “Those are the new directives.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Harry has his gun up, locked and loaded, as he quietly walks up to 2D, as Alyn silently follows behind him.  

He signals for Alyn to crouch down to cover him. The door is probably locked. They have to kick the door in. The agents will probably be disoriented for a second. He has that second to spot them and kill them. He will kill the man first because the man is the greater threat.

Alyn doesn’t fall into position. Alyn actually aims his gun at the glass window, pointing downward toward the floor, and then unloads several rounds into it, watching the holes in the glass build, watching the glass crack. 

Then he shatters the window with his elbow.

They can hear screaming from inside — female. They can also hear shouting from the adjacent motel rooms.

Alyn grins at Harry as he reaches in through a hole that he made and quickly unlocks the door.  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	35. Grey is having a day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey gets the shit-end of the stick of life again and tries to be a good person in the midst of it all. The future love of his life is probably a little more than embarrassed that she severely misjudged him just a second ago. Lysa Arryn proves to everyone in this episode that she is completely the worst. Alyn, that racist, thinks it's important to find the joy in work. Harry cannot believe the shit that is happening right now.

  
  
  
  


 

Her eyes squeeze shut and her hands automatically grab onto his body, to the sides of his ribcage, as he pushes her down to the ground and encircles her head in the cushion of his arm so that she doesn’t bang it into anything in the course of falling. Her body jolts in surprise at the successive explosions — and before she realizes it’s a gun firing, she thinks that it might be a bomb and that she’s about to die now — and so her arms end up holding him to her tightly, squeezing his body, trying to keep the two of them together — as he quickly and, with such strength, pries her off of him.

She tries to hold onto him — but he forces her to let him go. He firmly pushes her off of his body, and he slides her body forward behind the bed and wedged in between the frame and the wall. Her legs burn against the rough carpet as she slides.

“Stay down,” he says quickly. “Cut her legs free. First opening — _run to the car.”_

All she can do is get a nod in — even as she fights to comprehend what he even _means_.

And then, in this short bit of calm, he slides his gun to her, across the short distance between them. It’s hard to. With another partner, he’d play the odds and he’d keep the gun for himself because he can stand to do more work with it. With Drogo, he would probably keep the gun. But he is letting how he feels about her influence his decision-making right now. He’s probably going to die in a second. But he gives her the gun because he would rather she be armed running to the car. He rationalizes to himself that she really does need it more than he does.

Her hand comes down on the warm gun. She accidentally says his real name in the confusion of it all. She doesn’t understand why he is giving her the only gun either.

She says, “Grey —”

Then he’s moving.

He has to move fast because if he waits any longer, he is going to be dead sooner rather than later — and then she is dead along with him, too. His mind has already figured out that one of them needs to live so that all of this wasn’t _for nothing,_ that all of the sacrifices that have been made aren’t for _nothing._

His priorities are currently to distract in order to stave off her death.

He swipes up the steak knife that is still on the ground — and also the hammer in the beach bag lying at the foot of the bed. He stays crouched so there’s less chance of him getting hit by a bullet — and then he waits and watches as the knob twists and metal rustles — he watches as the door mundanely opens a crack and a slice of pure white sunlight temporarily blanks out the room.

  
  
  
  
  


Missandei is frantically undoing the knot tying Lysa to the bed before she gets to work on Lysa’s feet. Every cell is her body is on high alert — her heart and her mind is screaming out — screaming out that she is about to die — they are just all fucking _dead_ now. She self-indulgently thinks that she had no fucking time to warn her dad about this.

But a deep part, deep inside her, dwelling on the edge of her subconscious and consciousness — already knows that he already knows that this is _always_ a possibility. A part of her knows that he has already been preparing himself for this — and this is why he is always so sad — this is why she always makes him so sad.

She is struggling with the knot. She is temporarily handicapped, with the gun knocking against the headboard and Lysa’s wrist, before she lays it down on the bed because she realizes that she is _panicking_ and that her body and brain are _getting slammed_ with adrenaline. She makes shitty decisions sometimes when she experiences a high amount of stress. She has been trying to train this out of herself. She thought she’d have more time to get better at this.

She sucks in a breath and pauses — for just a moment — she lets the breath out. And then she goes back to work with slightly less shaky fingers.

The knot finally loosens.

  
  
  
  
  


Grey understands that their position is shitty. They are stuck in a room with only one exit out. He understands that the stairwell is slightly left and then straight down to the car. He understands that he fucking definitely should have procured _two fucking guns_ but he fucking thought he was being _overly cautious_ already because he didn’t realize that they are actually _fucked_ like this. He didn’t think that this fucking asshole was going to murder her husband in the middle of what was supposed to be another info-gathering trip. He didn’t think that this fucking bitch was going to mess with Missandei’s mind. He didn’t think Missandei would let her mind get messed with because he thought that she trusted him more than this. He didn’t think that Missandei would turn on him, based on the words of a fucking _stranger._ He didn’t realize that he’d be so fucking _distracted_ by how fucking butthurt he feels about it — that he is going to just _let them all die_ because all he is ever fucking good at is letting people fucking _die_ because he is so mired in his fucking _feelings._  

He has no idea who is on the other side of the door. He understands, however many there are, at least one of them are armed. He understands that his best chance at getting Missandei and Lysa to the car is to counterintuitively get in real close to this fucking asshole.

When the door fully opens, he sees one — male — he also sees a shadow — so two — hiding behind the wall. He hears Lysa’s screaming behind him.

So he throws the hammer at the asshole in the doorway with a gun pointed right at him. He throws the hammer so the asshole has to drop his stance and lift up his arms to block the hammer from slamming into his face.

And Grey runs.

They don’t expect him to run right to them — which is the only grace he has in this because he is severely out-matched in every way. They are armed. He has a knife. They are larger and taller than he is. There are two of them. There is only one of him.

Grey’s running faster than the asshole can get Grey back into the sight of the gun. Once Grey gets past the threshold of the door, he reaches up to blindly grab at the second asshole. He grabs a handful of hair as he shoves his shoulder into chest and his knife into skin.

He pulls out fast and he blindly tries to stab the other one — he’s got the element of surprise on his side for now. He is trying to run them to the railing to clear a path for Missandei.

His head and face whip hard to the side — and his vision blurs and blanks out and goes fuzzy for a moment. He hates close combat. It is pointlessly painful. He starts to lose saliva and bleed from his face. He gets a punch in, a hit into a wall of stomach muscles clenched up — before he gets rammed hard — he stumbles back.

He gets hit again — this time from behind — because they are double-teaming him — and the force of it knocks his body lose, dropping him down to his knees. He also drops his knife.

He looks up into a pale face, haloed by the sun. There is a gun pointed at his face. This is not the first time a gun has been pointed at his face — but it still fucking _sucks_ every single time. He is resigned to dying, every single time it happens, and this is probably why he never ends up crying over it or begging for his life. He is just sad that it’s going to be over. He is sad for his parents and his brother. It will be hard for them to learn that he died and to not be told why and how it happened. He hopes that they don’t have to see his body like this.

He looks into the gun and he tells himself that this is how it’s going to end. It’s not really what he expected when he woke up this morning — with her. He really hopes that she got out, at least.

Behind Grey, Harry is holding onto his stomach, from when Grey punched him. Harry’s rough voice angrily shouts at Alyn. He shouts, “Put him _down!”_

  
  
  


 

Alyn thinks that Harry doesn’t take enough enjoyment in his work — and what is even the point if there is no enjoyment. Work is something they spend a third of their lives doing. Alyn doesn’t see the point in being such a miserable and pathetic piece of shit all the time.

Alyn knocks the barrel of his gun into Grey’s forehead. A perk of this job that Alyn enjoys is that he enjoys exterminating dirty vermin from the world — he enjoys cleaning.

“You are not very big or strong,” Alyn tells Grey conversationally. He juts his chin to Harry. “He was worried. Now I bet he feels stupid. _Look at you.”_

Alyn sucks up saliva from the back of his throat and snot — and then he shoots it out of his mouth and into Grey’s face, who doesn’t flinch.

To Grey, Alyn says, “Valar morghulis.”

Grey looks up at Alyn — without feeling. He corrects Alyn. He says, “Valar dohaeris.”

Alyn actually laughs in delight at this — at the phrase and at the accent — because he assumed this fucker was generations-deep Westerosi, to have the job that he has.

Alyn chuckles because this is _great._ This is a fortuitous turn of events! It is like this is destiny!

He smiles widely and says to Grey, “You’re a slave!” like Grey has just made his entire day. Then he repositions his gun. “Do you want to say goodbye to your false god before you die, pig?”

  
  
  
  
  


Missandei has to fight against Lysa’s screaming, thrashing body, as her raw fingertips dig out his knots as fast as she can, as sweat burns her eyes and she starts abstractly counting down the seconds.

Her inexperience makes her neglect to secure Lysa — she doesn’t account for the volatility of responses in high-stress moments like this. She is just blindly following what he told her. Untie Lysa from the bed. Run to the car.

So Missy watches kind of blankly — in the span of a millisecond — as Lysa stands up from the bed with her arms still bound in front of her — as Lysa lets out another visceral scream and a sob — and then _runs out the open door_ —

Right to the armed men.

Missy sees Grey kneeling in front of a gun.

And her vision starts to go a little dark.

Lysa is screaming at them. She is viciously screaming, “Help me! Help me! What took you so long!”

  
  
  
  
  


Lysa’s screaming — and her surprising continuing state of aliveness — is enough of a distraction for Grey to recover enough to pick up his knife from the ground and drive it into the calf of the Valyrian — who shouts out in pain and then loses his footing. He accidentally drops his gun as he grabs onto the railing.

Missy sees Harry grimly start to hold up his weapon and point right down to Grey.

She doesn’t even think about it.

She automatically raises the gun in her hands and squeezes the trigger hard. The sound is loud.

Lysa gets pulled backwards, by Harry.

Missandei’s hands, wrists, and arms absorb the kick. As her ears ring, she squeezes out one, two, three more rounds — losing sight of everyone, as Grey shoves himself backwards, out of the line of fire, as the Valyrian hits the ground for the same reason, as his partner grabs onto Lysa and starts running with her.

  
  
  
  
  


Alyn is still alive — but bleeding out from his leg and also from his torso, from where Grey first stabbed him. For the first time in long seconds, there is a hush over everything — everyone in the building locked down when they heard gunshots.

Alyn is stunned that the tables have turned so quickly — and so quickly out of his favor. He starts unconsciously dragging his body backwards, after he raises himself to his elbows. As Grey slowly follows him forward, Alyn feels the familiar rise of anger and disgust — then he spits blood up at Grey’s body, as Grey steps on his right wrist and keeps it down, the one holding the gun.

Grey has to get in even closer, to pick the gun out of Alyn’s struggling hand. Grey knows that the guy is going to bleed out and pass out, if he doesn’t get to a hospital soon. He also knows that the police must have been called.

 _“Dirty pig,”_ Alyn rasps to him, with his teeth stained red.

Then he spits in Grey’s face again.

Alyn snaps, “Don’t you dare touch me!”

Missy watches as Grey silently takes Alyn’s gun, against Alyn’s weak struggling. The blood loss is taking over now.

And then Grey steps off of Alyn’s body and stands up to his full height. He hasn’t been sanctioned to kill at _all_ on this engagement. There are always rare extenuating circumstances that make it necessary though — and Missy wonders if this is one of those times.

But then Grey looks at her real quickly — she’s still in the motel room, standing in the doorway — he’s trying to signal her that they have to go — before he jumps and hikes himself over the railing.

She is like — _what the fuck?_

They are on the second floor — so he lets go and lets himself fall the somewhat short distance between floors. He stumbles forward uneasily after his feet slam into the asphalt.

With a gun clenched tightly in her hand, Missandei starts running past Alyn, to the stairs.

  
  
  
  
  


This motherfucker just won’t _die._

This is Harry’s current pain point, as he rushes Lysa by the arm to the car at the end of the lot. He shoves her at the dusty brown sedan and leaves her to figure out what the fuck to do next for herself — as he flips around to the sound of rapid footsteps and tries to take aim with his gun — before he realizes that the footsteps is coming from the female agent, not the male —

The realization comes entirely too late. The front of a car slams into the side of his legs, taking him down to the ground as he grunts in surprise.

He is wedged underneath the car, trying to grasp at his leg with both of his hands. He is trying to climb out against the raspy, hot asphalt as the driver’s side door opens. He thinks that this entire thing is just entirely _fucked_ because of that fucking piece of shit Valyrian. This is so fucked. This so fucked beyond _belief._ He is so _fucked._

“Who do you work for anyway?” Grey asks, squinting against the bright sun, looming, creating a shadow over Harry with a gun pointed at Harry’s head.

Grey realizes Harry is not just going to tell him this information, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, and it doesn’t hurt to give Missandei a second as she walks over to the passenger door of the brown car, finds it locked, and then angrily starts slamming the butt of her gun against the glass, cracking it as Lysa screams inside the car.

Not the most efficient way to do this — but again, she is new at this.

  
  
  
  
  


Grey is not sanctioned to kill, so he doesn’t. Killing so publicly would result in a greater political shitstorm than the current magnificent shitstorm they are already in the middle of.

After Missandei bodily rips Lysa out of the brown car, drags her stumbling a short distance, shoves her into the back seat of their rental car — before following in behind Lysa because _finally_ she is following protocol perfectly without any lip — Grey looks down at Harry.

Grey says, “Your leg might be a little broken. The cops are coming. Make good decisions, okay? Don’t be like your partner. He is bleeding out upstairs. You should go help him.”

Grey leans over and picks up Harry’s gun, too, from where it fell out of his grasp in the hit.

Harry stares up at Grey, who walks backwards with a gun still pointed at Harry. Harry watches as Grey easily slides into the driver’s seat of their black sedan.

And then Harry suppresses a scream of pain as Grey reverses off Harry’s leg, tearing his pants.

  
  
  
  
  


Missandei first restrains Lysa down with a seatbelt pulled really taut so that it has no give left — because this fucking traitous bitch is the fucking _worst_ — and Missandei ignores Lysa’s crying and wailing as Missandei reaches her hand around the driver’s seat and touches his chest tenderly from behind. She is unconsciously searching for his heartbeat.

Into the headrest — because this is as close to him as she can currently physically get — she mutters, “Are you okay?”

She is just utterly miserable. He is hurt. He almost _died._ No one is coming to help them. They have nowhere to go. They are stranded here. It is her fault. Because she didn’t trust him, and she told headquarters not to believe him.

“Are you hurt badly?” she whispers, clenching some of his shirt into her hand as she presses her fist and her knuckles hard into his chest, as she presses her own face and body as close to the back of his seat as she can, as she tries to hold the two of them together.

His voice is brusque and businesslike, as he removes her hand from his body with a hand on her wrist, as he responds to her concern for him by saying, “There’s a tracker somewhere on her. _Find it.”_

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	36. Grey and Missy are trapped

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now that he's not quickly dying, Grey finds that he might actually be slowly dying. With nowhere to go and no one coming to save him, he burdens an old friend. Missandei may be losing the future love of her life — slowly — right in front of her face. The future love of Missy's life is finally getting some international notoriety — he is finally exposed for being the violent, crazy menace that everyone has assumed he is.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Now that extreme imminent threat-of-death has passed, now that her world isn’t completely centered around not dying — she has lost some of her hyperfocus and her mind has started to drift a little bit.

As her pulse pounds from her body’s lingering fight and flight responses, a little bit of self-loathing breaks through. She understands that they are completely fucked, and it’s all her fucking fault. 

No. It’s actually more Lysa’s fault.

They bounce a little in the backseat, as Missandei angrily holds a gun to Lysa’s traitorous head and demands to know where the fucking tracker is. With her free left hand, Missy grabs a fistful of Lysa’s night shirt and starts to yank at it, trying to ineffectively rip it up into pieces, as Lysa tries to fight her off with her hands tied. Missy thinks that maybe the tracker is sewn into the fabric. Maybe the tracker is in the nightshirt. This woman isn’t wearing a bra. Maybe it is in her underwear. Maybe she swallowed it, and it’s in her body. Maybe she shoved it up her vagina. Maybe she put it up her ass.

Missy is looking around the backseat for a makeshift blade that she can use to cut this tracker out of his woman’s fucking ass when Grey’s voice plainly cuts into her unproductive anger and her extreme guilt from the front seat. He says, “It’s in her wedding ring.”

Missy lowers and holds the gun against Lysa’s ribcage as she looks down and rips off the woman’s wedding ring. She flips it over in her palm

“Yeah, that’s a bug,” she says, looking at the underside of it. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


_ Fuck the Valyrian. _

This is all Harry can coherently string together in his mind as he crawls on his arms and elbows, pushing his body weight along with his good leg and foot, laboriously dragging himself back to the car. 

The Company may be notorious for never breaking a contract, but Harry can see the return on investment on this engagement funneling down to fucking nothing by the second. He understands that this was what Connington wanted — to oust Harry from power by putting him on an impossible job with an unstable nut. 

As Harry pulls himself up and into the car with a grunt, he puts a slight amount of weight onto his left foot and then immediately crumples back down the hot ground in pain. That is it. He’s fucked. It is fucking  _ over. _

He hears sirens in the distance. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


By the time local law enforcement officers swarm the motel in great numbers, they have already been to the Arryn residence and they have already found the grisly dead bodies with slashed throats of the two household staff members and Jon Arryn. The mutilation of Jon Arryn’s body by Alyn, who was following orders, was designed to temporarily confuse the police. 

It has the desired effect. The police have doubled their numbers to try and fruitlessly mitigate the outcry from citizens. Word has already spread on social media that there is a serial killer on the loose. 

They find another dead man, an Asshai’i foreigner, in a hotel lobby. They find bullet holes, eye witnesses, and the bleeding unconscious body of a Valyrian man — late 20s to early 30s — lying next to a bloody serrated knife. 

  
  
  
  
  


As their car slows to a stop at a light, he rolls down the back window and has her throw Lysa’s ring into the bed of an adjacent truck. Then he rolls up the window again and, for a freak moment, considers turning the child locks on so the both of them cannot cause him any more fucking trouble — before he realizes that in the event of another shitshow, Missandei cannot be trapped in the back of a car.

When the light turns green, he gradually speeds up again. He stares resolutely ahead. He’s been driving for fifteen minutes now. His darker skin kind of hides the dried, sticky blood and snot splatter on his face from the many times the fucking Valyrian spat at him, but he still feels dirty and demeaned, and he still feels disgusted with himself and with what he has allowed to happen to them all. 

Grey’s hand still digs around in the dashboard for the leftover napkins that he shoved in there from their coffee stop the day before. His hands waver and shake a little — he is getting a little lightheaded too — as he uncaps a warm bottle of water and tries to drip a little onto the napkin.

“Let me help you,” she gently says to him, blindly reaching around from the back seat.

He doesn’t know how she’s supposed to watch fucking Lysa Arryn while she is playing nursemaid to his bleeding ass. So he snaps at her fucking ongoing terrible decision-making. He barks, “Pay attention to what you’re actually supposed to be _ doing!”  _ as he spills more water than he wants to. 

Missy purses her lips together tightly, sucking up whatever apology was tempted to slip out. She wants to tell him she is so very fucking sorry. She knows he does not currently want to hear it. 

Grey takes the sopping brown napkin from the console and wipes his face with it, dripping pink water down to his navy shirt. 

He gets a peek at himself and then her through the rearview mirror — his face is swelling up in places from when it was beaten in — and he finds that she is already staring back at him. 

His adrenaline is subsiding. His pain receptors are working again. His stomach is throbbing sharpness, making him grit his teeth together hard with each bump and turn of the road. He experimentally touches the source of the pain, over his torn shirt. It is sticky and damp. He is bleeding out of a wound — a long, burning streak on his stomach. He was clipped by one of the bullets — likely even one of hers from when she was shooting. Which is great because he’s gonna have to deal with her  _ fucking feelings _ on this later. He is lucky that he was not positioned another inch forward or else he’d be dead already, and she’d have to live with that for the rest of her life.

He is just bleeding slightly faster than he can clot. He feels okay for now. He is going to need to stop to tend to this or else he’s going to lose too much blood and lose consciousness. 

He sucks down water from the warm open container. 

He follows protocol — he has to continue forcing himself to trust her for the remainder of this engagement because she is still his partner. He releases a pain-filled groan as his hands tighten around the steering wheel. He says, “Okay, don’t freak out. But I was shot. I’m bleeding too much.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She is lightly holding Callie’s soft, small body in her arms, with the back of Callie’s sweet-smelling curly head pressed against her lips — as she points out a new sprout — these tiny, chubby pair of leaves that pop out bright green against the dark, damp soil. She kisses her daughter’s head and quietly tells her daughter that they are looking at a baby flower. 

Callie says, “Mommy, that’s not  _ flower.” _

“It’s going to be, sweetie,” she says. “It’s going to grow big one day like you, baby,” She mimes petals with her hands. “Like this.”

When Quaithe hears the telltale sound of crunching gravel underneath the spinning wheels of a slow-moving car — when she sees a shadow float behind the slats of her fencing — she stands up and picks up Callie in her arms. She hugs the girl to her body as her daughter’s arms come around her neck.

She runs into the house. She drops Callie at the foot of the stairs. She turns her daughter and pats her on the bottom. She says, “Go play upstairs in your room like we practiced. Turn the lock on your door. Don’t come down. Remember, only Mommy can come and get you.”

Callie hesitates. She says, “Mommy —”

“Do it  _ now, please.” _

Callie’s large brown eyes stares back at her — and Quaithe tries to soften the sting of her words. She gives her daughter an encouraging smile — and her gaze follows her daughter’s small back and her bouncy curls as Callie runs up the stairs to her bedroom closet.  

And before she forgets, she calls up, “I love you, Callie,” because — just in case.

Then, Quaithe’s heart is pounding a little hard as she goes to the closet, reaches up high to the top shelf that Callie doesn’t have access to for now, and she pulls out Heckler & Koch G36. She palms around for the clip, finds it, and then she loads a 30 magazine into it with a click. 

She grips the rifle in her hands as she retraces her steps back out into her yard, her feet stepping into shoes on her patio. 

She can see the car through the gaps in her fence.

She raises the rifle to her shoulder. She secures it. She looks through the sight. 

And then in Valyrian, she calls out — she tells them that this is private property and they are not welcomed here. She also them that she has a gun, and she will defend her home. She tells them to state their fucking business before making another move.

A deep, male voice responds. He says, “Skoros morghot vestri?” 

Quaithe exhales. She relaxes her stance a little bit. In response, she says, “Tubī daor.”

And then she says,  _ “Fuck.” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


When she opens the back fence door for him, she can tell that he is not okay, and he is also not alone. She can see that he parked the car backwards — which was what put her on high alert in the first place — she knows that he means to hide the plate. She knows that he must be in a lot of trouble to be here. 

She can see that he is very hurt right away — his face, his body, all of the blood stains — 

And yet she still finds it within herself to be just  _ pissed _ at him. 

He weakly jokes with her as his hand holds back the bleed coming from his stomach. He is standing alone because he thinks that she would be more receptive if he approached her alone and not with a screaming white woman. His breathing is labored as he tells her that he brought her back her gun. Plus two more. He has procured some presents for her.

“You know where I live,” she states. She does not like that he kept tabs on her at all.

“I’m sorry,” he says, actually looking regretful. “I didn’t want — I didn’t want to bring this to your door — but I —”

“I have a child now,” she tells him. “And you brought this to  _ my door.” _

His eyes go a little glassy at that. He softly says, “I know. I’m  _ sorry. _ I currently have no other options.” He swallows — with effort — and he’s blinking against the hot sun as he sways on his feet. And then he says, “I’m so  _ sorry.  _ I have no one else.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei knows that there is a dark spot soaked with blood, in the cushion of the front seat — between his legs, where he was sitting. 

Her eyes are dry and her skin is sweating — as she stares out the window and tries to somehow pick out what is happening right now and if he is okay. 

Grey left them in the car and told them to stay and say nothing. She had wanted to call out to him and ask him to slow down and to explain to her what is going on so that she can help him — but she refrained from doing that. In case her fucking idiocy continues being the thing that ends up  _ finishing him off _ and  _ killing him.  _

Lysa jolts with a squeak when a knock against her window startles her. She and Missandei look over and see a woman, face and head covered, holding an assault rifle, staring back at them. The woman’s eyes don’t look happy to see them whatsoever. 

Outside the car, Quaithe refocuses to the street with her rifle held down low. She knocks on the window of the car again. She says, “Get out. Follow me into the house.”

Missandei understands they have no choice but to comply. Grey left them to this, and this woman has a serious gun. Missandei quickly grabs her own handgun and secures her phone in her back pocket before she unlocks her door and gingerly eases herself out. She has to walk around the back of the car, getting lightly scratched by brush, as she meets Grey’s . . . friend on the other side. 

This fact is confirmed to her from the way the other woman doesn’t shoot her dead on the spot, from the way the other woman is letting her keep her weapon.

Missy doesn’t know how to hold her gun right now — she doesn’t know how to approach this woman holding an assault rifle in a friendly and non-threatening way while also holding a death-inducing weapon of her own. They actually don’t have a protocol for this sort of thing.

Missandei pops the door open on Lysa’s side wordlessly. She awkwardly conforms around the tip of Quaithe’s rifle as she reaches in and grabs Lysa’s arm and then pulls Lysa from the seat roughly, as Lysa resists because there are just a lot of guns in her immediate vicinity, and it is freaking her out.

Missy self-consciously gets impatient. Because Grey’s friend probably thinks she’s a fucking moron since she  _ is  _ one. She yanks Lysa to her feet, shoves her forward a little bit. Then she says, “You heard the lady. Move your feet.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They find Grey sitting at the kitchen table with a little girl, about three or four years old. He is still a bloody, violent-looking mess. She is tiny, pristine, and vulnerable-looking. There is a bowl of dry cereal in between them. She is picking out the green-colored ones because they are the best ones. She is sharing with him.

Quaithe immediately hooks her rifle around her shoulder, right there in the kitchen, and then she steps in front of Grey and she hurriedly picks her daughter up in her arms. She squeezes the little girl. 

Then in agitation, she brushes her daughter’s hair with her hand she says, “I told you not to come out. I told you only when I come  _ get you.” _

“I needed to potty, Mommy. And then Uncle said he a friend.”

Grey looks at Quaithe, pulling his face slightly like — oops. And then out loud, he also mildly says, “She just believed me. She’s entirely too trusting. You need to teach her better.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Her rifle and daughter disappear along with her, as they hear Quaithe’s rapid footsteps running up the stairs. 

Missy doesn’t even have the time to be awkward with him — she is busy tying Lysa to a chair, with twine that she finds in one of the kitchen drawers. 

Quaithe comes back downstairs with her daughter still in her arms and a bag over her shoulder — too fast to have been just packed, so she must have one at the ready for these situations — and also with an aluminum tin box — a first aid kit. Her phone squished to her ear and held there by her shoulder. In Asshai’i — because most non-Assahai’i people don’t understand or speak the language — Missandei overhears Quaithe tell the person on the phone that she is in the middle of an emergency, and that she needs for them to watch Callie. Quaithe tells the person it is urgent and she wouldn’t ask if she weren’t in dire straits. She tells the other person that Callie is currently unsafe with her.

Missy’s body and face constricts lightly at that — and both Quaithe and Grey pick out her sudden tenseness.

Still on the phone, Quaithe snaps the tin open and then slides it closer to Grey, who — of all things — picks out a tiny vial from underneath the organized gauze and bandages, and breaks the cap off, revealing a short needle.

He stands up.

Missy says, “Let me help you —”

Right as he lifts up a corner of his tattered shirt, pinches some skin at his hip near his wound, and stabs himself with it. He recaps and drops the spent needle back down the table in a neat bundle, in its wrappers. 

He turns his body a little bit away from Callie’s curious eyes — orienting straight at Missandei and Lysa, and then he lifts up his sticky shirt a little bit more. Dried, clotted blood has glued bits of his shirt to his stomach. He tests out how bad it is by separating the shirt from his skin, from the wound. He lefts out a soft grunt as he looks down at the sight of his messy, blood covered flesh wound — okay, it fucking hurts pretty badly. It fucking looks like a real mess.

Even Lysa goes,  _ “Oh.”  _

Missandei just wants to strangle this bitch  _ dead _ already.

She walks forward, toward him with her hands held out.

Her dirty-ass hands.

He doesn’t let her help him because she’s probably just going to infect him with even more germs,  _ what the fuck. _ He doesn’t even know where her fucking head is at right now. 

He is so abstractly angry at everything. At her. At his fucking self. At this stupidity. At his own stupidity. At headquarters. At the fucking organization. At Dany. At Sam for giving him pointless hope in his betterment. At Theon for being smarter than he is and leaving. At his parents for being smart and leaving him. At her for her abandonment of him. At himself because he probably fucking did something to deserve  _ all of this. _

When Missandei tries to pick out some alcohol wipes from the tin, he snaps at her and tells her, “I’ve  _ got it!”  _ and both she and Callie flinch. Missandei momentarily shuts her eyes in response. Callie is not used to sudden loud noises.

His tone softens immensely. And he says, “I’m sorry I scared you, honey.”

It takes Missy a beat to realize that he is talking to the child. 

Missandei then watches him pour capfuls of alcohol onto gauze and feels stupid about it — as he takes the bundle and wipes his hands with it. There is so much dirt and so much blood caked onto his hands — and it makes her feel sheepish because she realizes that her hands are probably in a similar state. 

She bites down on her bottom lip — in sympathy — as he wets some more gauze with alcohol and then uses his cleaned hands to press it at his wound. He starts cleaning away some of the dried blood so that he can better see what is going on. She realizes that the stupid wipes she pulled out wouldn’t have done anything. 

“Call home,” he mutters to her, not lifting his eyes from his body. “Give them an update.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Quaithe is off the phone now. Callie is on the ground. She was told to stay away from Grey — whether it’s because he is a threat to her or whether she will be traumatized by seeing him like this or whether it’s because Quaithe simply just wants Callie to stay out of his way as he tends to his wound — Missy doesn’t know.  

Quaithe has a pair of latex gloves snapped over her hands and is holding tweezers. The clip naturally got him over his shirt and shoved a bunch of fabric and dirty foreign matter into his body. Bleeding out won’t be his problem later — it will be infection. She kneels in front of him and gets in really close to his stomach. She starts to clean out his wound with the tweezers, as he wipes off dirt, as he hisses in pain but stays still. 

Lightly and quietly, Quaithe says, “You know what this reminds me of?”

Missandei sees the corner of his mouth quirk in the briefest of smiles. And then she hears him mutter, “Shut up.”

Before Missandei ducks into the next room for privacy, she hears Quaithe say to him, “You need to be on a course of antibiotics.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Drogo is tiredly and stiffly in the middle of other paperwork as he waits to hear back from the embassy in Valyria, when he gets notified that Missandei’s line rung in. 

Everyone in the office is tense and on guard, as they all quickly siphon back into the conference room.

They haven’t heard from Grey or Missandei in over an hour.

“What is going on over there?” Barristan asks, after the line connects.

The first thing she tells them is that she was wrong — they  _ do  _ need an extraction with Arryn right away. She tells them that there are other field agents or mercenaries in play and there was an altercation at their previous location. She tells them that everyone is alive but Grey was shot and he needs medical attention. She repeats that they need extraction, medical care for Grey, and a security detail for Arryn right away.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He feels marginally better because of the morphine, as he rubs antibiotic ointment directly into his wound. He knows that the painkiller is just masking his situation. He knows that he needs medical attention and antibiotics — or else he is fucked. He knows he doesn’t have a whole lot of time. 

He looks up and sees Quaithe holding her daughter in her arms. Her face is covered again. The loose, soft-looking bag is over her shoulder. 

In Valyrian, she tells him she will be back in about an hour. 

In Valyrian, he tells her again that he’s so sorry.

Before Quaithe leaves her house, after she bundles her daughter in her car, she takes a blue tarp and she throws it over Grey’s rental car.

  
  
  
  
  
  


They are all still on the line with Missandei, when Jojen gets them on another line — and it’s an emergency because he wouldn’t interrupt this meeting if it weren’t — and grimly tells them that they need to look at the screen that he is pushing through. This was flagged.

It’s the local Valryian TV news. They have a composite drawing of Grey. They list out his physical descriptions — his race, his gender, his height, his build, the clothes he is wearing — along with the fact that he is a foreign national. They state that he is a person of interest in multiple killings that have occurred in the last day. Five people are dead. A number of foreign nationals have died — the names are being withheld until next of kin can be contacted. One Valyrian is in the hospital being treated for life-threatening injuries. The news states that he has abducted one, maybe two women. 

The news states that authorities are saying that Grey is at large, and he is very dangerous so he should not be engaged with. They advise that all citizens stay in their homes until further notice. They urge anyone with any information about this person of interest call their hotline.

“Fuck,” Bronn breathes out. “We have to get them out.”

“Get the ambassador on the line,” Dany says, directing her order to Jojen. And then she adds, “And get  _ his face down.” _

“I will start scrubbing,” Jojen tells them. He doesn’t need to tell them that it’s a near-impossible task, with how information spreads these days. He says, “I’ve called in extra staff to come in.”

“I’ll contact the Valyrian news stations,” Tyrion says — he also doesn’t think it’s going to do much good at all. He doesn’t think they will comply with what he asks of them at all.

  
  
  
  
  
  


When she walks back into the kitchen, he humorlessly asks her, “How bad is it?” 

Instead of lightly joking with him and asking him if that’s actually supposed to be her line, she just silently walks over. She shows him her phone screen and lets him scan the news. 

After a few seconds, he plainly says, “Okay.”

So it is worse than what he was thinking. He realizes that he is constantly fucking underestimating  _ everything _ today. He realizes that he is just  _ fucking up _ royally today, repeatedly. 

“Are you all right?” she asks him softly, cupping his cheek with her palm, as Lysa watches them — but  _ fuck Lysa.  _

Missandei wants to tell him she’s so fucking sorry. She wants to promise him that she will never fucking doubt him ever again. She wants to make him understand that she will do every fucking thing he ever asks of her from here on out, if it just fucking  _ means _ that he makes it out of this  _ okay. _

He goes stiff underneath her touch. 

He doesn’t want to drug himself out with too much morphine. 

He takes her hand off his face. 

He is thinking that this is just beyond fucked up. He knows that the entire city is locking down now — because the government has to manage the hysteria of its people. There is no way any other officer can get into the country without getting walked in. He realizes that every flight out will be scrutinized heavily. He realizes that it’s going to be next to impossible now to get extracted secretly. It is too late. The door has closed on that option. They are now assets stuck in a foreign land, and they will be discussed and information may be weighed and traded. Sacrifices might have to be made. This is also not the first fucking time he has gone through something like this. 

He says to her, “No. I’m not okay.  _ We _ are  _ not _ okay.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Raella is on break and eating from a styrofoam bowl of cup o’ noodles with the TV droning on in the corner break room. When the drawing of his face flashes across the screen — when the news anchor states that he is armed and extremely dangerous — Raella remembers the handsome man and his beautiful wife who picked up a car from her the other day. She remembers them clearly because she never usually sees people like them dressed the way they were in these parts. 

She makes a grab for a pen and one of the car rental place's pamphlets. She writes down the number of the hotline.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 


	37. Grey loses hope

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bunch of people make a bunch of empty promises to Grey in this episode. His bosses promise that they will get him out. The future love of his life promises him he will be okay. Grey is pretty sure he is fucked and death is imminent because he's been to this rodeo once already. Missy tries to be a good fake-wife/real partner and hold her man down while he is like, dying, but her personal feelings for him are making it impossible for her to see clearly. Dany totally gets yelled at so hard by Drogo. And then there's some naked showering.

  
  


 

They have to wait for the next series of directives — or for more information. He supposes that headquarters is probably bitching him out for making a real mess of this shit — for not just letting Lysa’s ass go and letting his and Missandei’s asses get murdered so that there isn’t a fucking entire city shutdown because of his desperate desire to preserve life.

He has nothing left to do or to say — not to Lysa at least. He already knows that she’s a piece of shit liar who killed her husband for her own self-interests. He already knows that she is working with the fucking assholes that tried to put bullets in him and Missandei. It has been confirmed. Multiple times over. Like, there is no fucking ambiguity left here, on Lysa’s loyalties and her intentions — so he has nothing left to say to this fucking asshole anymore.

He just sits at Quaithe’s kitchen table and glares at her. Because he just wants to look into the face of the fucking asshole who has stolen his entire life away.

A deep and dark and quiet part of him unwillingly remembers that he did this exact same thing with Bolton. He remembers sitting and staring at Bolton and committing that fucker’s face to his memory because he wanted to _die_ with that kind of hate imprinted in his _fucking brain_ forever.

“You have to understand,” Lysa finally says — pulling in some calm in the long stretches of quiet that she is finally being afforded. “I did it for my son.”

“Shut up!” Missandei snaps, overreacting, still trying to process the fact that she actually believed _this fucking liar_ over her _partner._ “Or I’m going to fucking _kill you.”_

Grey says nothing. Because it does not matter anymore. Nothing that happened in the past matters at all. They just have to wait now.

  
  


 

The ambassador in Valyria is _pissed_ because he did not know about the operation at all. Dany doesn’t really think that it’s in his purview to know about all operations in Valyria, but she does not voice this opinion at this time.

He tells Dany that this is a huge embarrassment, and they have essentially just pulled down their pants and shown their asses to the rest of the world. He demands to know how _this happened._  

Over the line, Dany mildly says, “We had incomplete information,” because it is the truth.

And then before he can continue huffing and puffing out his displeasure, she sneaks in her request. She says, “We need to push through our officers’ employment paperwork and get it on the embassy books as soon as possible.”

In response to this, he accurately states, “You want to secure them diplomatic immunity.”

“Yes.”

  
  
  


 

Drogo is immediately in her face the moment she opens the door to her office. He is immediately flaring his nostrils and acting like it fucking _helps anyone._ He stands up to his full height and tries to physically intimidate her in that bullshit way that he does. He says, “Well?”

“We wait,” she tells him — as if he doesn’t already know how this shit fucking _works._

“We wait while they die?” Drogo pushes at her. “Grey got _shot.”_

She fucking _knows._ Facts are facts. Facts don’t fucking change facts. She can’t make anything move any fucking faster. An anonymous officer getting shot overseas during an engagement does not matter that much politically to their ambassador, and it matters _not at all_ to the Valyrian government. The Valyrian government is going to find out soon, that Grey and Missandei are _theirs_ , and then there will be a lot of discussion and bullshit about how they are conducting covert operations within Valyrian borders when there was an agreement for them to actually _reduce_ their numbers.

They are going to want someone to take responsibility for this. They will want to see culpability. They will want to put a face to the killings that have instilled terror in the people. Dany knows the land and the people intimately well. She is sure that the tensions in that country will snap soon — probably violently. There are already decades worth of ongoing issues with the perceived displacement of Old Valyria by foreigners. Seeing a foreigner on the news, supposedly responsible for killing so many people — it is not good at all.

The fucking _fact_ is that they are only at the start of this shit storm. Drogo throwing his pathetic weight around does not change that. Being reminded that she is about to fail Grey, _again_ , does not change that.

“We have to wait,” she calmly tells him.

He looks utterly disgusted with her. Because he thinks she is heartless and that all she knows how to do is cover her own fucking Valyrian ass as the people underneath her die and sacrifice their bodies.

Drogo wants to know how many fucking times Grey has to _bleed_ for her. Is she not going to be happy until he _dies?_

“This is the same old shit all over again,” he says to her, trying to control his voice. And then he yells — and practically everyone on the floor can hear him. He shouts, “This is the exact same shit as Bolton — all over _again!_ They are trapped there! He is _dying!_ Give a fucking _shit,_ Daenerys! Even if you don’t give one fuck about Grey, remember that _Missandei_ is there, too! _”_

She doesn’t say anything in response to this. Because she doesn’t have the luxury of feeling terrible about it.

Tyrion breaks in anyway. Tyrion clears his throat as he walks up to them. He says, “We’re waiting for you. Time to hop on the line.”

  
  


 

All he fucking wants to do is sit and wait as infection grows inside of him, as he points a gun at fucking Lysa, so he finds it really annoying that headquarters is pulling him away from the thing that he currently wants to do the most.

Missandei lets him stay sitting — but he has to do it in the other room. She takes a kitchen chair in there for him. She also lets him keep holding his gun. She actually sits in the chair he reluctantly vacates with her gun and replaces him in front of Lysa, so that he can feel somewhat comforted by the fact that there is still a gun in Lysa’s face.

Grey resents that Missandei is being helpful, as he winces around his wound and then listens for the familiar voices of his people — and fucking _Dany._ They sound falsely cheerful — and its so fucking annoying and stupid because obviously this shit is just fucked.

When Tyrion asks him how he’s feeling, Grey says, “Uh, not great?” He is still kind of sour that they did not listen to him — that they listened to Missandei over him. He doesn’t understand why he’s even on this fucking call, if Missandei can relay all of the fucking shit to them herself.

In Grey’s ear, Drogo says, “We’re trying to get you out, buddy.”

In response to that, Grey grimly says, “I’m pretty sure I’m going to die here.”

In his ear, he can hear Drogo’s voice a little farther away. Drogo is needlessly telling the rest of them that Grey is just joking around.

In response to that, Grey says, “I’m not. I don’t find any of this funny at all.”

  
  


 

After the terrible pleasantries are done, Grey recaps the recent events in startlingly clear detail. He understands why he was called to. It’s partly to get this level of detail and clarity, and it’s also to give him back some of his say — some of his control and some of his voice.

The basic psychology of it is offensive to him, that is why he is so cold and so pissed off, as he details everything that happened, from the moment they woke up to this moment — as Jojen presumably records it all down. He is not even self-conscious or weird about it, when he tells them that he and Missandei woke up in bed at around five after eight and talked for a few minutes with each other before they both heard Lysa’s screaming in the master bedroom, down the hall and to the left.

He details the inconsistency in Lysa’s language — how she described her and Jon Arryn’s son as “my son” — and how there was a mirror on the bedside table — how her husband’s body was rolled over onto his back. How the covers were neatly pulled over him. How she had been feeding him drinks the entire day before — how she always handed Grey his own drinks instead of placing cups on the table.

He details that Lysa easily agreed to calling the police and was wrapped up how she was going to explain herself to them. He thought that was very strange. That’s why he made the decision that they had to leave the house right away.

He details that he thought she definitely killed her husband, but he needed to double check his judgement. Missandei was meant to double check his judgement. She did not come to the same conclusion.

He details the motel room. He details the contract killers — he felt something familiar about the procedure of the killers. The non-Valyrian is probably from the Company.

Grey details out how pure fucking luck saved their asses — the Valyrian’s volatility, Lysa running right to their captors, Missandei firing her gun. A stray bullet clipped him.

It’s when Selmy asks him where they are currently hiding out at — that he hesitates.

Because he doesn’t fully trust them anymore. He has already put a target on Quaithe and her daughter’s back by being here. He doesn’t trust that leadership won’t fuck this up. He hasn’t trusted them enough since they left him too long with Bolton.

“We are tracking your phone,” Dany reminds him. “We already know the coordinates. Who is _helping you?”_

She wants to know if the person helping him is trustworthy. And he thinks it’s fucking rich that Daenerys is so concerned about trustworthiness.

And then he realizes that it’s Missandei she is giving a shit about. He shakes his head slowly, because he is so fucking dumb right now.

“We’ve pulled Sandor,” Arya tells him. “He’s heading that way. He’s about four hours out.”

Grey says, “Why? He won’t be able to get in. He’ll need to be walked in. And no one will walk him in. How’s he gonna walk a known fugitive _out_ of the country?”

And then after a pause — because fucking duh — God, his mind is so slow from blood loss and the drug — Grey says, “Oh. He’s not for us. He’s for Lysa. Because she’s not a fugitive. She’s my victim. Got it.”

“Son,” Selmy says, sighing because he is hearing Grey’s despondency loud and clear. “Please hang in there, okay? We’re coming for you. I promise.”

Grey shakes his head again.  

  
  


 

When Quaithe gets back — alone — she finds that Grey is irritatingly pessimistic about the state of his life — and it’s extremely not helpful and it is also self-indulgent. She throws some male clothes that she has procured for him — by buying them — and she tells him to go clean himself in the shower. It will make him feel better.

And then before he can grumble about _that,_ she also tells him, “They know the make and model and the license plate of your car. It’s all over the news. I’ve removed the plates and tossed them for you.”

He says, “Oh, great. And thank you.”

“Go shower. If you’re going to die today, you might as well die clean.”

He points a finger at her. He says, “I’ve missed your honesty.”

  
  


 

He takes his gun with him to the bathroom because it makes him feel better, because nothing else about this day should be able to surprise him. He doesn’t bother locking the door because he will need to get out fast if it comes down to it.

He internally screams as he bends over to turn on the faucet.

As the water warms up and runs — he gingerly pulls off his shirt — it has restuck itself to his skin a little bit — _amazing._ His shirt drops to the floor. And then he woozily pulls off the tape holding his bandage to his body — already bled through — but not as alarming as before. He breathes through the fog in his head. He is realizing that he is more drugged up than he expected to be — that fucking Valyrian morphine. He absently and bitterly thinks to himself that white people just fucking love opioids so fucking much.

She must have sensed that he needs help — or she just wants to burden him with her feelings — because the door cracks open.

He picks up his gun. He leans heavily against the bathroom sink — he loads it — he aims — he waits —

She quietly says, “It’s me,” as her eyes spot the gun. And then in explanation, she says, “Your friend is watching Lysa for us. Don’t worry, there is still a death-weapon pointed at Lysa’s face.”

He breathes out as he lowers his gun.

  
  


 

She wants to start crying, now that they are alone and she is free to just feel the oppressive weight of _everything._ Her hand goes to her mouth as she looks at him — shirtless and with a leaking wound on his stomach. She has figured out that _that’s_ her fault, too. She was the one who shot him, accidentally.

He doesn’t really feel like making her feel better about this. He doesn’t really feel like being the asshole who tells a pretty woman: Hey, it’s okay that you told people I was going crazy and then accidentally shot me to save me. It happens sometimes.

He also doesn’t feel like talking about this. He doesn’t feel like allowing himself to feel things. His world is currently very narrow by necessity. He is not here to be the epicenter of her guilt. He is here to clean the overly cologned stink of some ethnic cleanser wannabe _off of his face and body._

“So I’m taking off my pants now,” he announces to her, as his hands to go to his zipper. And it’s pretty much a kiss off. Like, give him some privacy please.

She softly says, “Okay,” as she shuts the door fully behind her. They hear it latch.

With some impatience, he says, “Missandei — you’re supposed to be on the _other side_ of the door.”

  
  


 

He is struggling with his slacks because they have stiffened from the dried blood and caked-on dirt. Every time he clenches his stomach muscles in the course of trying to push down his pants, his wound erupts in more leakage and also more pain.

It just looks sad.

She quickly walks up to him and starts helping him pull down his pants. He tries to kind of fight her off because he doesn’t really fucking want her to _do this_ for him, but he is being careful not to actually hit her in a real way.

He is breathing hard, and he is probably a goner because everyone in the entire city knows what he looks like — so he eventually relents and lets her undress him the rest of the way.

He feels her struggling a little bit as she pulls his stiff pants and underwear down his legs. He doesn’t bother making a tension-relieving joke about the state of his fucking body — because it does not even matter anymore — what they used to have and what they used to do with one another.

Her eyes are watery when she stands back up and looks into his face.

It’s the exact kind of look that he has been wanting to avoid, so he tries to walk away from her.

He stumbles forward and reaches out to steady himself, using the glass door of the shower. He leaves a handprint there.

He feels her hands on his ribcage and spine, trying to keep him balanced, trying to help him step into the tub.

  
  


 

He doesn’t really expect for her to get into the tub with him — but she does. She quickly undresses herself down to her bare, naked body. Given what happened to them, she is remarkably unmarred — still pretty much perfect-looking.

He makes space for her in the shower, stepping backwards, even as he frowns at her. She is blocking a lot of the spray. She gasps a little bit against the heat of the water. The water running off their bodies is dark and brown.

It’s there — in the flow of water — in the intimate space with him — that she kind of allows herself to break down a little bit. Her hand goes back to covering her mouth — she clamps her palm to her lips tightly — she transparently stares at his bruised and swollen face — and also his damaged body — and she starts to cry.

She cries really hard — so hard that she has to press her hand even harder to her mouth to muffle the sound of it. Her body curls inward on itself a little — her face is pointed to where he was cut.

He doesn’t know what the point of this is. He doesn’t know why he is being made to watch this.

  
  


 

She’s crying because she loves him. And she doesn’t know why someone she loves has to be so hurt like this.

It takes her long moments before she can regain her composure, before she can lift her hand off of her mouth again.

He is holding himself up with his forearm braced against the tile wall — he is fairly concerned at how progressively weak is he becoming. He is wondering if it’s the morphine, if it’s the blood loss, if it’s the lack of sleep from the past few days, or if it's that fucking asshole Lysa Arryn who tried to have him and Missandei killed. He has forgotten that he had just one bite of food so far today. He has forgotten that he hasn’t been sleeping well for the better part of an entire year.

“I — don’t think I’m doing good,” he whispers to her. “I feel really weak and tired.” He admits this to her because she’s his partner, and she needs all of the information so that she can make the right decisions. Like — maybe she will have to leave him behind at some point because he will have become too great of a liability to her. Maybe she will have to leave him because he is dead weight that is just sinking her.  Maybe she _had_ to give him a little bit up to leadership, as practice for giving him up completely soon enough.  

Her eyes are red, and she is crying quietly along with the shower, as she reaches up to hold onto his face. She raspily says, “No, you’re _fine.”_ She wipes some of the water from his lashes with her thumbs. Her voice cracks as she repeats it. She softly says, “Look at you, you’re fine. Grey, you’re going to be just fine, babe. Of course you are. Okay? _Okay?_ Don’t talk like that, okay? Don’t give up, okay? Stay _with me._ We’re gonna get out together.”

God, she’s so fucking delusional. Why is he always the only one whose mental state is in question?

He sucks in a deep breath — he sucks up a little bit of water up his nose, which stings and makes his own eyes water a little bit — and he tells her the truth — because that’s all they have left now.

He whispers her, “I’m _not_ okay.” He whispers out to her something he’s been thinking in secret — that he already knows the outcome of this. He whispers, “I’ve been through this before. I know how this _feels._ It feels like _this._ I know what the end feels like. I know how much time I have left. And I’ve thought about this _a lot —_ about what I would have done differently with my people if I had a chance to do it all over again.”

A really, really loud sob accidentally escapes from her mouth — before she squeezes her eyes tightly together and clamps her hand back over her mouth.

She’s crying hard again, so he can’t even be sure she’s even listening all that well right now, but he still works to hold himself up. He still says, “You gotta get outta here, Miss. Through whatever means necessary, okay? No one will hold it against you that much if you didn’t wait for new directives — they can take a while to come down. They are trying to get us into the embassy right now — but you know that there’s no fucking way my ass is going to make it to the embassy. Because my face is _everywhere._ But you can make it there — without me.”

  
  


 

She is completely not listening to him. In fact, she is just saying, _“No,”_ a lot — in a muffled litany behind both of her hands as she continues crying.

He is so tired, that he has to sit down, on the floor of the tub. She tries to blindly grab onto him, but he slips out of her wet grasp. He just doesn’t think he should die in Quaithe’s house, either. It would be very complicated for her — with his body. He should probably get the fuck out of here while he can still sort of move, so that he doesn’t bring his tragic shit down on Quaithe and her daughter because they don’t deserve this.

He tiredly tries to wash himself with the run off that is coming down from her body, as she squats down and hot water hits him right in the face.

  
  


 

Her crying shuts down immediately once he starts passing out in the shower. He quietly tells her, “Fuck, it’s happening,” as he fades away.

She actually instinctively shouts out — she shouts, “Help!” as she shuts off the water, as she grasps onto his wet body and holds his head in her hand, lightly slapping his cheek and saying, “Grey, wake up. Baby. Grey, wake up. Grey, _wake up. Oh my God._ Grey. _Grey.”_

She hears a pair of running feet, coming up the stairs.

She is holding him to herself, sitting on the floor of the tub nakedly, as the door to the shower slides open, as Quaithe’s alarmed face and tall body looks down at them.

“What happened?”

“He passed out.”

“You sure?” Quaithe asks, reaching down to search for a pulse in his neck. She means — is Missandei sure that he isn’t just _dead —_ and that makes the now-familiar thread of panic start to pound in Missandei’s head and her chest.

“Oh,” Quaithe says, finding a faint heartbeat. “I think his blood pressure is really low.” She sighs. “He really needs to go to the hospital.”

 

 

 

 


	38. Grey is super unconscious

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey sleeps through most of this episode. Missy is all up in her feelings this episode because the future love of her life is just barely hanging on. Lysa is pretty bored because Grey dying is not really that entertaining for her. Quaithe is MVP this chapter and goes to a dance club! And OMG, we spot glimpses of Cersei and the more famous Jon. Sandor is stuck on a plane. Harry gets demoted. Drogo doesn't think people give enough shits about what is going on. Everyone hates Dany. Everyone is having a pretty bad day, really.

  
  


Missandei is on the verge of unproductively breaking down and crying over this, which tells Quaithe many things about Missandei and Torgo Nudho. Certain things have evidently changed in the time that she has been gone from the organization. Also, Missandei is fairly green.

Quaithe authoritatively tells Missandei to get up and to go into the bedroom on the left to grab some clothes — Quaithe tells Missandei to go get dressed — and then go downstairs to check on Lysa.

When Missandei minutely resists this, by tightening her arms around his unconscious head and shoulders, Quaithe tells Missandei that it will all be fine. She will pull his body out of the tub and will let him continue sleeping in the bedroom. He probably passed out because his body knows that he needs to rest it.

Quaithe is talking to Missandei like she is a child.

And it is necessary, because Missandei’s entire face is transparently transmitting the fact that she is losing her entire shit right now.

Missandei starts to say, “Do you mean — is he going to be —”

“You can see him again in five minutes,” Quaithe promises.  

  
  
  
  


 

Davos keeps early hours, so he is already pretty awake and has been for a while, when he gets an unexpected call and is requested to come into work for a consult.

He knows something big is up when he is told that the meeting is in the big building. Then, he knows it’s pretty bad when he sees the people waiting for him in the conference room.

He says, “Mornin',” as he walks to the nearest empty seat.

“We apologize for interrupting you on your day off,” Cersei Lannister smoothly says. “But we’re in need of your expertise.”

“Of course, ma’am,” Davos says, sitting down, glancing at Daenerys, who is sitting stock-still, with her hands folded together on top of the table. Jon looks utterly miserable.

“One of our officers was seriously injured in an altercation,” Cersei says. “We believe at least one of the agents tracking our officers in Valyria are from the Company.”

“Ah,” Davos says. “I see. That’s unfortunate. Which officer was injured?”

Cersei leans forward to look at the papers in front of her. With a little bit of uncertainty, she says, “Nud-ho Tor-go.”

“It’s Torgo Nudho, actually,” Dany interjects, her voice clipped and her voice tight.

Davos does not like this kind of thick, aggressive tension — especially not from women because it is odd. So to dispel some of his discomfort, he clears his throat and gruffly says, “Ah, yes. Because you say the family name first.” He clears his throat again. “I know him. He’s young but really experienced, has a really good record for the most part. What happened?”

  
  
  
  


 

As she lifts his naked body and drags him into her bed — she notes that he has been mutilated — many things _have_ changed.

She quickly pulls a sheet over his wet body, to preserve his modesty.

Quaithe thinks through her fairly limited options. She didn’t anticipate that she’d be mired in this today. She needs to cancel her dinner arrangements with her daughter’s father’s mother because Torgo Nudho really needs stronger antibiotics. He also needs fluid replacement pretty urgently. She can either break in somewhere and steal the supplies — but doing so will likely be discovered within the next 12 hours, if not sooner than that. It will mark his geographical location.  

Another option is to call in an immense favor to one of her nursing acquaintances. They would have to trust her enough to give her supplies and medication.

A third option is just let him die. She is not entertaining this option as a realistic one. But it is still an option.

  
  
  
  


 

The Company never breaks a contract, so Harry expects the absolute worse when he reports in. He expects to be excommunicated.

And he is — in a way. It’s up to him, how he is going to treat his broken leg and how he is going to get back to Braavos.

But Connington tells him that the client has terminated the contract. Connington snears and tells Harry that Harry fucked it up real nicely.

“I thought he really wanted to secure her,” Harry says into his phone, as he sweats in his car and winces around the throbbing pain of his leg.

“Don’t be fucking stupid, Strickland,” Connington says over the line. “Things have changed because you royally fucked this. The cost of going through the Valyrian government is too great. He is cutting her loose.”

  
  
  
  


 

Quaithe packs a handgun — the one that Torgo Nudho brought back to her — and then tells his partner that she will be back with better supplies — hopefully. She tells the woman to sit tight and try to eat something calorie-dense from inside the fridge. She needs her energy, too.

Missandei is dressed in another woman’s clothes. Her hair is wet and she is scared and she feels alone. She was promised that she could see him again by this point. She is having a hard time managing the stress and the continuing emotional toll of what has happened and what is happening. She is simplistically wary that she cannot trust another woman she barely knows because the first time she did this, Grey ended up shot — by her hand. She doesn’t have him in her sight — she is worried she is being tricked again and she is stuck in this nightmarish house with two liars. She does not care that this woman has a child, too. She has simplistically learned that women with children can be deeply flawed and terrible people, too.

“Where are you going?” Missandei asks Quaithe.

And in High Valyrian, rather matter-of-factly, Quaithe tells Missandei that he is dying upstairs and is in serious need of medical care. The local law enforcement is looking for him. What they really should right now do is give him up so he gets medical care, and also so that a world of pain doesn’t rain down on the rest of them. That is the prudent thing to do.

Quaithe hikes a bag containing her gun and bullets onto her shoulder. She tells Missandei that they are currently not doing the most prudent thing. They are going to attempt the harder thing, in order to try and keep him. She tells Missandei these things in a way to make Missandei understand the utter risk Quaithe is undergoing when she’s been out for years — because he used to be her partner at one point.

Quaithe tells Missandei that she has to trust her, for no other reason than it’s her only option right now. She tells Missandei that if she doesn’t come back within two hours and if he’s still unconscious, then take him to the hospital right away.

“Aren't you people healers?” Lysa asks Quaithe, not needing to understand the Valyrian to understand what is going on. She is saying this with a slight sneer, like she knows their customs are snake oil. “Why don’t you just heal him with your magic?” she asks rhetorically.

“Shut up!” Missandei shouts.

  
  
  
  


 

After Quaithe leaves the house, Missandei takes a gun and a knife — a bit overkill, but her hands are shaking even though she has crammed some cheese and some mayonnaise into her face — and she pulls Lysa and a kitchen chair upstairs.

In the bedroom, she ties Lysa tightly down to the chair with knots and a technique that he taught her, so the binding stays tight. She wants to keep Lysa in sight so that Lysa doesn’t escape — because otherwise everything they have done today would've been for fucking nothing. She is also determined let Lysa see what the fuck she has done.

After Lysa is squared away, Missandei walks over to him and cups his warm cheek for a moment — noting that he is maybe developing a fever — but relieved that he is warm and breathing and still alive. She lifts the sheet from his body and looks underneath it. She finds that he’s still naked and his body has made the bedding damp. His wound is also leaking, just a little bit, into Quaithe’s sheet.

She takes her gun and knife and quickly runs downstairs to retrieve the first aid kit.

Then, with him still unrelentingly unconscious, with her sitting cross-legged on the mattress, underneath the bedding, she pushes the sheet down to his hips and sets the first aid tin on the bed. She gets to work bandaging him up again.

She runs her hand down his arm and pulls his hand into her lap for comfort, as she tries to read the tiny writing on the morphine injection by holding it up to the light. Maybe he accidentally dosed himself with too much.

“Are you two actually married?” Lysa asks.

“Go fuck yourself,” Missandei shoots back.

  
  
  


 

 

In the course of creatively improvising a temporary solution — honestly not her strongest skill — she remembers that Valyrians love dance music from the many times she has observed how persistently annoying dance music is when she hears it on the streets. She also recalls watching a news story about dance clubs trying to maximize profits through questionable but not illegal practices. She wryly thinks that hers is not the only culture prone to snake oil cures.

The door is locked, naturally. She remembers that Khal Drogo used to be quick to break locks and break windows. She also remembers that Torgo Nudho used to hang back and be noncommittal in their methods sometimes. She remembers that Khal Drogo used to get impatient with how she skirted around buildings. Her desire to stay an undetectable ghost used to be annoying to him.  

She finds that a window was left open, though. One floor up. In the current heatwave, many Valyrians have left windows open for air circulation.

Quaithe starts to climb.

  
  
  
  


 

After she finishes covering his wound again, Missandei remains upright in bed even though she would rather lay down beside him. She sits upright in bed so she can keep her eyes on Lysa. She sits like this also so she can see the steady rise and fall of his chest, to ensure to herself that he’s still alive. She has his hand still in her lap, squeezing it tightly every now and then, feeling the warmth of his rising body heat. She wonders if he’s still in pain. She hasn’t given him more morphine even though he dosed himself correctly. She is hoping that the pain will wake him back up at some point. And then they’d deal with that together at least.

She has been typing out message updates for headquarters on her phone. They know that Grey has taken a turn for the worse. They know that he is unconscious. She has asked for updated directives in light of this new information. She knows that Jojen’s team is logging her messages because of how their system works. But there is still no word back from headquarters and leadership. While they are aware that he is in dire straits, there has been no response yet.

She remembers the last time this happened. She was a lower level analyst back then, so her clearance keep her looped in on the emergency as it unfolded, but she was not privy to the solution-building. She remembers Dany not sleeping for days. She remembers the beard that Tyrion grew because he never went home. She remembers being obliquely concerned for a man she barely knew, in that abstract way that people with ideologies feel when there is a casualty in the course of fulfilling ideology. She actually remembers being more concerned about her best friend and how Dany was managing the stress of potentially losing an asset that she had a close working relationship with. Missy had known that Dany was fond of him, and Missy remembers thinking that losing him would be really hard on Dany. So for that reason — she had hoped that Grey would make it out okay — at the time.

She remembers trying to figure out who would contact and tell his family members, if he died in the field.

She also remembers self-indulgently crying next to his bedside when they got him back, when he still wasn’t out of the woods. She was less concerned about his family then. She was actually more having a hard time seeing tangible evidence of the work that they do — with what happened to his body. That was the very first time she witnessed a consequence of the work that they do. She was wondering if she was making the right choice, by transferring departments. She was wondering if the same thing would happen to her. She was wondering if her dad would have to sit at her bedside and watch her fight for her life at one point in the future.

She sucks in a long sniff of air and holds it in her burning lungs for a moment, as she picks up her phone _again_ and then, because she is _so mad_ at herself that she might as well fucking tank her career _right now,_ she writes:

_So we’re just waiting for him to die now? What do you want me to do with his body after he dies? Do you want me to throw it away like it is trash?_

  
  
  
  


 

They have spent more than half an hour circling the skies because there is an incredible clusterfuck backlog at the airport — because the airport temporarily paused customs and immigration and didn’t receive foreigners into the country for an hour or so, after news of the foreign serial killer broke. This has affected all international flights since. All passengers on international flights have been sitting ducks, either camped out in the airport as they wait their turn with an immigration officer — or stuck in the sky because they are not cleared for landing because there are too many planes trying to land. Some flights have had to divert to other airports. Others have been canceled. Most of the people around him have not been able to keep apprised of the latest news because they’ve been in the air and they haven’t had consistent internet access.

Most of them don’t know that this fucking city is run by overreacting idiots who are calling the clusterfuck at the airport precautionary measures in combating terrorism.

He’s been giving headquarters periodic update, even though they know where he is. He is stuck in the sky. He hasn’t slept in over a day.

The pilot gets on the intercom again and — _again —_ tells them that he doesn’t know when they will be cleared to land. They have enough fuel for another half an hour before they have to divert to another airport. He tells this to them in Valyrian first — and the entire plane groans in unison — before he repeats it all in accented and broken Common Tongue. Sandor’s ears have to fight through the Valyrian muttered chattering around him, to hear the explanation.

Grey is probably dead. This is probably going to be the thing that finally does in Grey. Nevertheless, of course they have to fucking _try_.

Sandor shuts his eyes and tries to relax his mind and body for a quick nap. He would be better for Grey if he had just a little bit of rest.

  
  
  
  


 

Drogo sees Missandei’s latest update come in — and the level of how pissed off it is does not even register in him. Because he is already right there, too.

He’s been quietly whispering to Selmy. He’s been trying to figure out what their options even are, even if they weren’t bogged down by leadership and by an ambassador who is too pissed to be very productive with a government that is even more pissed — as their man is just _fucking dying_. They can’t do a military extraction — that is just fucking crazy and nearly an immeasureable cost of resources that the organization will never sanction. Neither of them have any relationships with the Valyrian government because neither of them are Valyrian. Dany is all they’ve got there, and she is maddenly blase and fucking slow-moving and Drogo just bets that she just _wishes_ Grey would die so that he’d stop being this albatross that hangs around her neck all the time.

“Don’t say that,” Barristan says quietly. “Sometimes people don’t know you are joking.”

“Who says I’m joking?” Drogo asks challengingly.  

“The fact of the matter is — I don’t think there’s anything we can do for him right now,” Barristan says, his face grim. “Have you talked to her yet?”

“Missandei?”

“No.”

“Ah,” Drogo says, in realization. “Not yet. Haven’t been able to connect. I imagine she’s currently got her hands full.”

“Maybe try again in a bit,” Barristan says gently. “It would be good to gather more information.”

  
  
  
  


 

Her hands are tender and the muscles in her arms are quivering, as she lowers herself the final drop to the floor of the building. She’s out of practice because she didn’t think she’d be doing this kind of work again. She thought her life now was mostly about trying to enroll Callie into the right preschool — a non-Valyrian one. That was her mistake, thinking that she would ever be completely “out.” This became abundantly clear to her the second her phone started silently notifying her that a call with a disguised number is trying to get through to her. She realizes that her so-called liberation from them has been more smoke and mirrors than it has been reality.

She hasn’t picked up because she doesn’t want to listen to their orders anymore. She is also busy.

The light filters through the windows up high and she imagines this place looks more regal through the dark flare of red mood lighting at night. In the daylight, everything is a touch dusty and stained. She walks past the bar with bottles and bottles of premium liquor. She walks across a long dance floor. She finds another, smaller bar in the next room. She sees a winding staircase that go up to a row of sofas. There are velvet ropes sectioning off the couches.

She sees the toilets and smells bleach — this place must get cleaned fairly quickly after the end of each night — or morning. She actually hears the quietly conversation of two voices — in Low Valyrian, so probably immigrants, probably the cleaning women. They are on the second floor, in the toilets.

Quaithe is so fucking _relieved_ when she sees a neat row of IV poles in a small room adjacent to the downstairs toilets. She silently rushes in there and spots the supply cabinet tucked in a corner of the room. She throws as many hydration bags into her purse as it can hold, along with double of everything, just in case: tourniquets, catheters, administration sets. She grabs a fistful of alcohol wipes even though she probably still has more than enough at home.

She quietly leaves out the back door — she assessed the place, so she knows that’s the door that the service people enter through. She cannot turn the deadbolt from the outside, but it’s probable the cleaning women will probably think they accidentally left the doors unlocked today. They might admonish one another, but they will probably think nothing of it. Quaithe is not sure how close of a watch the club keeps on their inventory of medical supplies. She thinks that it’s possible employee theft or drunk customer theft is a fairly common occurrence here.

She thinks that she has all of her bases covered — but again, it’s been so long since she’s had to do this work and she’s fairly out of practice.

  
  
  


 

 

Lysa reminds her — with this quiet sadistic kind of glee — when it’s been two hours. There is a digital alarm clock on Quaithe’s side table and Lysa has been watching it. Right at the two hour mark, Lysa smiles a little bit and tells Missandei that time is up. It’s time to call an ambulance. Lysa tells Missandei, “It looks like the both of us will have lost our husbands today.”

Missandei squeezes his hand in her lap. She cannot believe that she believed this _fucking bitch_ who is clearly a fucking asshole devoid of morals over Grey. This will be the mistake that haunts her for the rest of her life — especially if he fucking _dies_ knowing that she betrayed him like that.

Missandei doesn’t engage with her. She knows that Lysa is bored and so Lysa is trying to taunt her to get entertainment. She knows that everything Grey suspected about this woman has been proven more or less true. She knows that she was left behind by Grey’s friend because Grey’s friend knows that all she can be trusted to do is watch a woman who is tied up. She knows that this is probably the wrong fucking job for her and she should go back to what she is good at. If she had done that, he’d be partnered with someone who is actually capable, and he wouldn’t be dying right now.

She knows that she is fucking up, _right now_ because it’s been two hours and ten minutes, and she just _can’t_ give him up. She is a fucking piece of shit because she would rather he die in her arms, than give him up to the Valyrian government and give him a chance at living. For a little while longer.

All of her options are fucking terrible.

There has been _no fucking word_ from leadership. They haven’t even been cleared for entrance into the embassy.

She wishes he were awake so that he could tell her what the best thing to do is. She realizes that he knows everything, and she is insecure and uncertain without him.

She wishes she could turn back time. She’d do her fight with him differently. She would apologize to him for asking too much. She would tell him that she’d accept any small part of himself that he is willing to give her, as long as it meant he was going to stay healthy and safe.

She rubs her face. Her hair is a mess, but it is dry now. She needs to get him to a hospital. She needs to take him herself instead of calling an ambulance because Lysa is a fucking shit. He would want her to preserve the peaceful lives of his friend and his friend’s daughter.

She gets off the bed. She leans down and holds onto his head again — just wasting fucking time as he slowly dies. She allows herself to kiss the side of his face, and she doesn’t allow herself to tell him she is sorry because that is self-indulgent and she has done enough to him. She wishes she could trade places with him. He doesn’t deserve this.

She’s about to untie Lysa from the chair and drag her downstairs and into the car — as the front door to the house opens, as she hears footsteps running up the stairs, as Missy picks up her gun from the side table and readies it, as Quaithe’s familiar body and covered face appears in the bedroom doorway.

Missandei relaxes, just the tiniest bit.

And then Quaithe runs to the bed.

  
  
  
  


 

Dany raises her face up from her laptop, when she hears a soft knock on her door.

She frowns when she sees who it is.

He is frowning too, in a different way. He holds up a plastic bag of takeout containers in explanation — she can smell fried garlic and guess that it’s probably pasta.

Daario gently says, “I figured you might be hungry.”

In response to him, she says, “You need to leave my office. Right now. This is inappropriate.”

  
  
  
  


 

He wakes up slowly — and with a throbbing headache that feels like the worst hangover of his life. He wakes up piecemeal, with consciousness flitting in and out of his grasp. He sometimes hears them talking before he fades away again.

He regains consciousness with more concreteness as she shakes him along. Her hand is on his shoulder, jiggling him and making him nauseous as he opens his eyes.

She looks stunned to see his eyes. His mouth is so dry that he doesn’t feel like he can talk.

She softly says, “Babe,” as she stops jostling him, as she transfers her hand to his face. She is still scared of saying his real name in front of Lysa, but she refuses to call him by his fake name anymore.

“Drink this,” Quaithe says, breaking into the intimate thing Torgo Nudho has going on with his new partner with one of Callie’s juice boxes. It is pure sugar, and it has a straw. She pokes the straw into his mouth and starts squeezing the box.

  
  
  
  



	39. Missy and Grey are cleared for the embassy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey and Missy continue to be sitting ducks as they wait for clearance from their embassy. It comes through, FINALLY! We learn what Alyn, that blood-thirsty Valyrian, does for a day job. Dany is trying to do the right thing, but it's hard to know what the right thing is sometimes. Sandor is having an annoying day on the job. Drogo and Selmy are really worried about their boy. Grey tells the future love of his life that she makes him happy, FINALLY. But it may be too little too late.

  
  
  
  
  


When he wakes up, when he finally wakes up for good, his head is throbbing and his throat is dry. He finds there is a needle stuck in his arm and bright lights making his eyes sting.

His eyes tear up slightly — it’s a physiological response — as he blinks his vision back to life. 

“Alyn.”

He swings his eyes to the corner of the room. He sees their dark blue uniform. He sees the golden shine of a badge. He sees a row of neat buttons.

His voice cracks as he says, “Vagar.”  

His sergeant tells him that he’s in the hospital, that he was found unconscious at a motel, bleeding out from stab wounds. It’s now seven o’clock at night, the same day. His sergeant tells him the doctors say he will make a full recovery as long as he takes it easy for a few months. His sergeant asks him just  _ what happened —  _ why he was he at the motel? Why didn’t he carry his identification? There were casings from their department-issued firearms at the scene — but  _ where is his gun?  _

His sergeant apologizes as Alyn hacks out a cough. His sergeant says that he knows it’s a lot of questions and that Alyn just woke up. His sergeant stands up and fills a small cup of water from the pitcher a nurse left next to his bedside. Alyn gets handed the paper cup.

  
  
  
  
  
  


When she gets confirmation from their embassy in Valyria that Grey and Missandei papers were finally approved and pushed through and that they both appear on the embassy’s employees list, backdated to two days ago — she has to wait in tense uncomfortable silence afterward because Tyrion tells her that Drogo is taking a quick break and is on his way back up.

Their ambassador initially pushed for them being assigned to the consulate because it was an easier task. Dany pushed back and pressed for the embassy. The convention on diplomatic relations has a broader scope than the convention on consular relations. She will not have them stuck on a technicality, because blood was shed. She has learned from the last time this happened — she knows she needs to be more thorough and more extreme in her protection of her people. She has been telling herself that in the end of all of this, her people won’t remember that this took longer. She won’t be remembered for being a bureaucratic obstacle to progress. They will all just be ecstatic that they have Grey and Missandei back.

Drogo stinks of cigarette smoke when he appears at the door three minutes later. He doesn’t apologize for taking a break because he doesn’t think he should apologize for that. If anything, he actually grumbles underneath his breath about the fact that the elevators in the building are fucking slow. 

And then when he learns that they waited for him before moving onto next steps, he actually snaps at them. He says, “What the fuck? You haven’t  _ told _ them they need to hustle their asses to the embassy yet? What the fuck are you even waiting for!”

While she understands where Drogo is coming from, Dany really resents being spoken to like this. She also knows this kind of heat does not help with Cersei. 

In response to his fit, she calmly and dismissively tells Drogo, “So why don’t you go tell Jojen personally then, if it concerns you this much?” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


_ “Enough,” _ he says, swatting at the piece of bread Quaithe is trying to shove into his mouth. She is forcing him to stay in bed to rest. She won’t let him get up. She won’t take the IV out of his arm. 

She responds to his refusal to eat by slapping him full-on, in the face. It makes him blink and shut his eyes in surprise. It makes Missandei release a gasp. 

Quaithe ignores both responses — she feels like she’s dealing with a child who is not her own right now — and she resents this. So she insistently says, “You need to eat. When was the last time you used the toilet?” 

Missandei sells him out on this. She tattles and says, “Oh, he hasn’t yet, today, I don’t think?” And then in a short jolt of realization, she says, “Neither of us have.”  

Calling attention to it for the first time makes her remember a need that she’s subconsciously suppressed all day. She really needs to pee. She stands up and looks at him expectantly. She holds her hand out to him. She says, “Do you want to go first?”

He bitterly resents being treated like a child. He resents being force-fed. He resents being swaddled in a bunch of blankets even though it’s the thick of summer. He resents being carried to the toilet like he is an invalid. He resents just being a fucking obstacle and a liability. He doesn’t even know why he woke up for this shit.

Missandei’s hands are on his face and then gently on his arms — when he shrugs her off. He doesn’t look her in the face because he feels inexplicably ashamed and weak. 

Without looking at her, he mutters, “No. Not you.” He nods quickly at Quaithe. He says, “You.” And then he adds, “Please.”

He knows he’s too weak to support his own weight. He knows because it takes gargatuan effort to raise his fucking arm. He knows that he is burning up and sweating up in the bed. He knows that when the sheets are lifted off of his body, he will be naked — and he will start shivering. He does not want this to be one of the last things Missandei remembers about him.

He adds, “Can I have some privacy?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei gets banished back to the kitchen with Lysa. 

After she is gone, with Quaithe’s help, he puts some clothes back on just so he can have pants to pull down once she plops him on a toilet seat. They don’t put a shirt on him because it would just get in the way of the needle stuck in his arm and the bag of saline solution attached to that. He grimaces as she slides a loose-fitting pair of pants up his legs. He feels generally humiliated and vulnerable. 

As if reading his mind, she says, “This reminds me of Mantarys — you remember that?”

Drogo had caught a blood-transmitted infection from a mosquito that he eventually got hospitalized and treated for when they got back to King’s Landing. But for about three days before transport, they were all holed up in a safe house, putting up with Drogo’s constant and very alarming bloody puking and bloody wet shitting. Drogo was a jackass to the both of them and refused help because he was embarrassed. 

So Grey loosens up a little bit, at the trip down memory lane. He gets her point. He gingerly holds onto his saline bag and slips his arm around her shoulders.

Once she’s got him on the toilet and gets his pants back down, with his help nudging back and forth on the seat, Quaithe crosses her arms and stands back to regard him.

He asks, “You’re seriously going to stand there and watch me pee?”

She doesn’t answer that — she doesn’t care. Rather, she responds with, “You’re sleeping with your partner. How come?” She means that it’s so unlike him. She wants to know if there is some other kind of consideration or angle here that she isn’t aware of. She wants to know if there is something important she ought to know about Missandei — and this matters because Missandei is in her house and knows about and has seen her daughter.

He slowly shakes his head. He says, “I don’t fucking know why,” as he reaches a free hand in between his thighs and pushes what is left of his penis down into the bowl. This is how he pees now, and she is the first person to witness this besides the nurse who taught him and the doctor who walked in on him and the nurse one time. Grey unpinches his bladder and starts peeing in front of her because why the fuck not? 

“How did that happen?” she asks — referring to his injury — her voice much softer now.

The carefulness in her voice touches something deep inside of him. It probably combines with how uncomfortably raw and open it feels to pee in front of her — because his eyes go a little wet. He looks off the side as he continues letting an alarming amount of urine out, as he feels so small, as he tells her, “How do you think it happened?”

She sighs. “I’m sorry, Torgo Nudho.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She hovers near the stairwell uncertainly, stretching her ears and perking up a little bit in anxiety when she hears the toilet flush and the door reopen. Lysa has her eyes shut and is maybe trying to nap away the mundanity of being held hostage by the people she tried to have killed. 

When she sees his bare feet slowly and gingerly make their way down the stairs, she steps out and watches him descend with Quaithe’s help, with one hand gripping his IV bag and the other gripping the bannister. There is a knit blanket thrown across his shoulders. He looks like he’s lost an impossible amount of weight in the last seven hours alone. 

He looks terrible. 

Missy holds up her phone. She can’t help but let an encouraging smile slip out. She tells him, “We were approved. We need to get to the embassy asap.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Sandor gets yelled at by a cranky customs agent who is underpaid and has been working a double-shift because of the emergency shut down. Sandor gets yelled at and insulted for not speaking any Valyrian, for going to a country with the audacity of not even knowing a lick of the language. The customs agent looks at Sandor’s passport — a tourist visa was the best he could do on short notice — and the agent spitefully tells Sandor he is stupid, in accented Common Tongue. 

Sandor generally says nothing. He generally refrains from slamming his fist into the face of this impotent power-tripping piece of shit in a dead-end job. 

The heat swallows up him once he breaks out into baggage claim. The air is thick and the doors are open. Even though it is evening, the sun is still shining brightly in the sky. The floor is a mess of chatter, bodies, elbows, and body odor, as people fight to get to their pick-ups or to hail cabs. There is congestion leading out of the airport.

Sandor thinks that it’s his overt foreignness and maybe his face, that is preventing him from getting picked up by a cabbie in a timely manner. And he is generally right — he just doesn’t realize the extent of it yet.

He looks up to the droning TV screen that is bolted to the wall. He looks up because he sees the composite drawing of Grey again. And then he sees a Valyrian being interviewed from a hospital bed by a swarm of TV news reporters — intercut with the drawing of Grey. 

He can’t hear what is being said, so he pulls out his phone and quickly searches for the news on his phone, in a language he can read.

He finds it quickly enough. It says that one of Grey’s victims was an off-duty Valyrian police officer.

His phone rings right after that. Arya.

He picks up. He says, “So. This is royally fucked. Am I still to make my way to them?” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Quaithe draws all of the curtains and blinds on the lower level of her house and has her rifle out again, hooked over her shoulder so that it is always nearby, as she urgently speaks on the phone with her friend who is watching Callie in Asshai’i. She is peering out a crack in the curtains, surveying her front yard as kids a little bit older than Callie ride their bikes up and down the street.

Her friend wants to know when Quaithe is coming back for her daughter — tonight? Tomorrow? When? Quaithe keeps whispering and saying she doesn’t know when she will be back for Callie. She talks into the phone and says she will explain everything later, but right now, she is rather tied up.

Grey doesn’t speak Asshai’i but he knows what is happening. He forces himself to sit in it. He makes himself remember the many evenings he chilled with Quaithe and Drogo, during lulls on the job, and the many, many times Quaithe shrugged and told them that she is probably a lifer. She used to rhetorically ask them what she was even going to do if she were to leave the organization? What do her skills really amount to, anyway?

He sees evidence of Quaithe’s daughter all over this house, from the drawings stuck to the fridge to the dishware stacked in the drying rack to the toys that are strewn about. He is actually  _ wearing  _ one of Callie’s blankets around his shoulders right now.

The TV is turned on low in the background. He already knows that the Valyrian asshole is a cop because why not? Because of course  _ he is. _ Grey already knows that protest demonstrations have broken out across the city, over the optics of a foreign national potentially murdering Valyrian residents — and not only them, but maiming  _ cop who is a citizen _ on top of that? Grey has already watched that fucking blond asshole provide all of these elegant and heroic low-key anti-foreign power, anti-immigration sound bytes from his hospital bed. Grey knows it’s only a matter of time before the thus-far peaceful protests become violent riots. And the city is probably activating a bunch of on-call officers in preparation, as more and more protests break out. People are demanding answers. And justice.

Grey listens as Quaithe’s voice goes softer and more tender, and he guesses that she must be talking to her daughter.

When she hangs up, he’s about to apologize to her again — for the fucking millionth time because he is so sorry for bringing himself to her like this — but then her phone shakes again. She looks down at the screen and groans softly.

She picks up the line. She says, “M’ach.”

That’s how Grey knows that it’s Drogo.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Drogo starts slamming the flat of his hand repeatedly on Selmy’s back, when he finally connects with Quaithe. Selmy quickly shuts the door, locks it, and then Drogo lays his phone down on his desk, putting her on speaker phone. 

“Is our boy hanging in there?” he says to her in greeting.

Her voice is dry and droll and utterly serious, as she says, “Barely.” And then in their code — because she hasn’t forgotten, she also tells them that Grey is running a fever, his wound is going to become infected. He needs a doctor. He will not make it anywhere far for very long.

Drogo’s end of the conversation is secure, so he fades into old dynamics and he simply tells her, “He will.” She was always the fastidious planner who was slow. He was always optimistically improvisational who was fast, but chaotic.

Drogo also asks, “Can we talk to him?” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey doesn’t expect to talk to Selmy — just to Drogo — so Selmy’s calm and plaintive voice coming through the line on Quaithe’s phone is like a hit in the solar plexus. His chest clenches up tightly, and it becomes hard to breathe for a moment. 

He starts to pull in breaths fast, pushing them out just as fast, trying to get his head clear and his emotions in check. He still profusely wants to start apologizing because he feels so terrible. He feels like he has failed and he’s been failing for a long time. He shouldn’t have gotten himself shot. He shouldn’t have made Missandei not believe in him. He shouldn’t have just assumed this was a routine engagement. He shouldn’t have overlooked Lysa’s capabilities. He shouldn’t have stabbed the Valyrian. It’s his fault that the organization is hemorrhaging right now, trying to get him and Missandei out. It’s going to be his fault if she becomes collateral damage because of his mistakes.

He tries to hide himself from the rest of them, even though he can’t even fucking move himself from the couch, as he says, “Sir —” before he pauses again, because he doesn’t know  _ what _ to actually say.

Into his ear, Selmy quietly says, “Son,” and it makes him remember the first time they met and the first time Selmy tried to recruit him. 

And then Selmy’s voice tightens up into his professionalism. He starts to tell Grey what Grey is to do and what is expected of him. Grey takes a moment to absorb the switch, and so his mind fights the words. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Quaithe tells Missandei that they have to leave the guns — they have to go unarmed, because they cannot carry and possess firearms illegally as they enter the embassy. Missandei’s heart is pounding hard, as she tries to look at him for confirmation of this, as he continues keeping his face turned away from her. He’s been mired in his own head. She knows he is concerned about staying awake long enough to get to the embassy. She  _ knows _ that he will make it — and she’s been trying to tell him this silently. But he won’t look at her. She keeps trying to relay to him what she’s been told by Drogo, Barristan, and the organization. It’s _ finally  _ happening. They are _ finally _ getting extracted. Sandor is on his way to get them. Sandor will transport them to the embassy safely. And then they will  _ finally  _ get to go home. 

Missandei looks down at the gun in her hand and then obediently nods and then reluctantly releases it from her tight grasp. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey understands that this is the shittiest non-plan ever. He understands that they are all very attached to him so they are all following along with this stupid fucking non-plan and acting like it’s going to not fucking result in the deaths of them all. He understands that they are all scarred from what happened years ago with him, and they are trying to fix past mistakes by applying an emotional response to a situation that is completely different. He understands that Dany is doing her best — that Drogo, Selmy, Sandor, Arya, Tyrion — all of them — are doing their very best because they care about him. 

But he also knows that the deck that is stacked against him has been building up, higher and higher. He knows the situation is currently unwinnable for them. He knows that the conditions or rules have to change in order for them to actually have a chance. He cannot have more blood on his conscience. He cannot have more people die because of him. He especially cannot let her die because of his own shortcomings. 

Quaithe knows, too. She silently watches him detach the IV from his arm. She supervises as he gently pulls off the tape and then slides the needle out. He puts it on her coffee table, on a napkin, in a neat pile. He starts bleeding a little bit from the wound, and his blood is bright red, which is comforting. He holds up his arm for her to put the bandaid that she has ready for him. 

Missandei is gathering their items and typing out messages on her phone because she wants to know what the procedure is with Lysa, so she doesn’t pay much attention as Quaithe slides a white shirt over Grey’s head and helps him slide his arms through the holes. He grimaces out a smile in thanks for this.

And then, she puts the car keys of his rental into his hand when he holds it out to her. 

This is when Missandei pauses. She looks over to him from where she is standing in the threshold where the kitchen meets the living room. She says, “What are you doing? We’re waiting for S, remember?” She says it carefully, like maybe he has forgotten in his whooziness. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


It takes her a second to understand what he is planning on doing. But when she does — when she sees him push himself to his feet with effort, when she sees that his shoes are on and sees him reaching for a gun that his friend quietly hands to him after wiping off all other prints — it is the Valyrian’s gun that he lifted at the motel — 

Missandei immediately starts crying.

She starts shaking her head as her hand goes up to cover her mouth. She says, “No,” to him.

He slips the gun into his pocket. The weight of it drags down his pants. He leans tiredly against the arm of the couch. He holds out his hands and arms to her — and it’s the first time in what feels like ages — so she just runs over to him. She throws her own arms around him and holds onto him tightly.

He lets her hug him for a short moment, but they don’t have much time — or he doesn’t — so he moves it along by nudging her back a little bit. 

Then he grabs onto her face in both of his hands — they are clammy but her face is already wet. He is squishing her cheeks together and making her lips pout — because he can’t help himself. He leans forward and he lets himself kiss her mouth one last time. 

She cries as his lips makes contact with hers — and she kind of refuses to engage in this with him — in this way — because she knows that he is trying to say goodbye to her and she is  _ refusing _ to say goodbye.

He still kisses her through the crying and also through her resistance — because this all they have left now. He continues holding her face, and he squeezes it hard. He forces her to kiss him back, because this  _ is _ the  _ last time.  _

She whimpers and shuts her eyes as she crushes his body to hers again, with her arms. She presses her mouth against his urgently, letting her cries sneak out in between the gaps of their mouths.  

And after he  _ feels  _ her kiss him back, he makes himself break away. He softens his hold on her face — he brushes his fingers softly across her wet cheeks. 

He presses his forehead against hers. He hears her go quiet for a little bit — so he says, “Don’t punish yourself this over this, okay?”

She immediately starts sobbing again, pressing her head harder against his. She brokenly says,  _ “No.” _

“Listen,” he says soothingly, brushing his hand over her hair now. “Listen for a second, okay? Guilt is a poison. Self-hatred is a poison. Don’t do it yourself. You don’t deserve it.”  

_ “Grey —”  _

“This would’ve happened  _ anyway,” _ he whispers. “We were being stalked from the beginning. They had a tracker. Whatever you said to anyone, about me — it made no difference at all to the outcome. The borders would’ve gotten shut down anyway. My face would’ve been all over the news anyway. We would’ve been stuck like this no matter what. It’s  _ not  _ your fault, okay?”

_ “Shut up,” _ she grinds out, her voice tight and tense now. She tells him, “Don’t talk like that — it’s not the  _ time _ to talk like  _ that,”  _ as she tries to hold onto him tighter — and she starts to cry again as she feels him start to resist her hold on him.

“You will probably have to wait a few hours — before the all-clear,” he continues on. “And then S will be here. And he will transport you to the embassy. It will be okay.”

“He’s going to transport  _ us _ to the embassy,” she says, trying to correct him. “You have to hold on — he’s _ coming for us —” _

_ “Listen,” _ he says insistently, before he lowers his voice again, touching her hair again. “Just listen, okay?” he says, as he knocks their foreheads together again, lightly. “I held on once and I followed orders to the letter before. Because that’s what you’re supposed to do.” He clears his throat. “And — you know — what’s done is done. Right now at least, I get to have some say in what happens to my own life.”

“So make the decision to stay and fight,” she tells him, transferring her hands from his body to his face. “Make the decision to stay  _ with me.” _

“Okay, you are not listening,” he tells her. “That’s just not an option, Miss. We all die — you, me, S, maybe even Q, and then what happens to her kid? — if I stay with you guys.”

“Then  _ just me,” _ she says, negotiating, lifting up her voice into this painful cheerfulness. She is stroking his face, as tears drip down her cheeks. “Where are we going together, babe?” she asks him softly. “I’ll drive us there.”

“Hey, you don’t need to atone for anything,” he tells her softly, trying to wipe her face and her nose for her with his thumbs, because looking at it is just killing him inside. 

He tries to think back to the first time they met — and he can’t remember the exact moment because it was a long time ago and it took a while for them to become close. 

So instead, he thinks back to just this morning, when they were in bed together. He thinks about how scared he was that she was so close to him — that she was becoming so close to him. He thinks that he’s made a lot of mistakes with her — and hopefully she will forget them in time and mostly remember him fondly. He thinks that his fear of her closeness was a stupid problem that he used to have in life. And it was a really nice problem to have.  

So he whispers, “I want you have a nice, long,  _ happy  _ life.” And this is when he starts to lose it a little bit — he tears up a little bit and tries to vigorously blink it away. “These last few months with you — the last year with you, actually — it was all really nice. You made me happy.”

She starts shaking — as she suppresses sobbing. Her words comes out in short, controlled, quiet spurts, as her hands tighten on his clothes, as she says, “Grey — don’t — do this — _ don’t do this — to us.” _

He resists telling her that it’s already too late. It is already done.

He is pulling her arms off of him. She is resisting and hanging on. 

She gets louder about it — more emotional and distraught. He responds by trying to mentally block out the sound of her screaming. She is starting to get angry at him now for wanting to leave her — and because she is scared of losing him. Her fist is tight and strong in his shirt. 

He is gently saying her name and telling her that she has to let go. He is telling her that he’s sorry — but that she will be okay.  

He has to rip himself out of her grasp, as she fights him — and Quaithe has to lay an arm across Missandei’s chest — holding her back — as he walks out of the back door, shutting it closed behind him.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He starts the car, pulls out of the driveway quickly, and then he makes it a lot further than he expects to. 

He almost makes it to the hospital before he gets pulled over. He momentarily entertains just finishing his drive to the hospital and seeing what happens — but he already knows what would happen. Death. Death a little bit faster.

So he pulls over. The Valyrian’s gun is sitting in the passenger seat. He holds up his arms and he places his hands high on the wheel. He looks straight ahead at the horizon.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	40. Grey is lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh man, Missandei has lost the future love of her life and gets yelled at by Drogo to boot. Selmy has lost his surrogate son. Dany has lost her former number one, and gets yelled at by Drogo to boot. Drogo has lost his best friend and when he runs out of women to blame and yell at, he hops on a plane. Grey's parents' worst fears are coming alive. No one is having a good time this episode.

  
  
  
  
  


Quaithe avoids prolonged restraint of Missandei because it could result in the both of them injured. Rather, she lets Missandei go when she hears him drive the car away. And then she backs away with her rifle at her shoulder, blocking the backdoor. She is going to try and reason with Grey’s partner.

Missandei’s eyes are wet and wild, her face unevenly flushed. She is face-to-face with Quaithe again, as she viciously demands, _“Move!”_

“He’s gone,” Quaithe says quickly. “You don’t know where he’s going. You don’t have a vehicle. You won’t find him before the police do, and even if you do — _you can’t help him_ against _them.”_

“I don’t care!” Missandei try to lunge forward, through a small opening through the door, which Quaithe sees and blocks.

She knocks Missandei back a small step with her body.  

“What if it was _your kid!”_ Missandei shouts, bringing her fist up to her eyes to wipe harshly and clear her vision.

“It’s not the same thing,” Quaithe says softly and calmly. “He’s an adult. He made a choice. And if he makes it out of this alive, he’ll want to see you again — in one piece. He did this to keep us safe. Don’t throw his sacrifice away. Don’t make it worth nothing.” 

  
  
  
  


Drogo is in the midst of canceling his plans with his mom — and he only _just_ remembered that he has dinner plans with his mom in _an hour_ because his personal phone chimed and reminded him. His mother is used to his constant cancellations in the name of work — so she is still definitely ticked off at him, but she is not surprised. 

He’s in the middle of saying, “Sorry, Ma — let’s reschedule right now,” and he’s about to suggest Wednesday night or maybe Saturday lunch when he spots Jojen’s really pink, really sweaty face through the glass window of an empty office that he ducked into for some privacy. 

Jojen holds up a finger — which signals to Drogo that he needs to get right back into the conference room.

Drogo says, “Ah, fuck. Sorry, Ma. I gotta go. Bye!” And then he hangs up on his mother before listening for her exasperation with him or a return goodbye.

He books it out of the office and toward the conference room, behind Jojen as he pockets his personal phone into his back pocket.  

  
  
  
  


“What do you mean he’s gone?” Jon asks into the intercom. “Where did he go?”

There is a really lengthy pause on the other end, and it makes Barristan wonder if they lost connection with Missandei, so he asks, “Missandei, are you still there?”

It’s another second before her voice comes back on the line. Her tone is stilted and clipped, as she says, “I don’t know where he went. He took the car keys to our rental, and then he drove away. I could not stop him.”

There is another long pause as they wait for her to say _something else,_ maybe something more specific, maybe give them more of an explanation.

 _“Missandei!”_ Drogo finally snaps — just in disbelief that this is happening, just fucking sick of her fucking long pauses, sick of her bland delivery, fucking sick of her ongoing fucking uselessness and shitty judgement. 

He is sick of the months and months that he wasted giving a shit about this person’s improvement and her feelings. Drogo is sick of being pressured by Daenerys for an entire year to make this shit with a deadweight _work_ when he _knew_ she was a ticking bomb. He is sick that Missandei’s vagina fucked Grey in the brain and made him do this _crazy_ self-sacrificing _shit._ He is fucking sick of _himself,_ because he didn’t have the balls to just stop this shit and their relationship from happening and now Grey is as good as fucking _dead — again._

So he releases his boiling anger the only way he knows how. He starts yelling at her and humiliating her. He shouts at the intercom. He says, “How do you even fucking let _your gunshot victim_ walk out the fucking house! You are telling us that after you _fucked up_ and told us his judgement is compromised, after you went and fucking _shot him_ — after a fucking _year_ of innumerable resources diverted to _train you —_ you just let a dying man walk out the door? Are _you_ fucking working with Lysa Arryn or something and just forgot to tell us? Because how are you _this bad_ at your fucking _job!”_

“Drogo,” Dany cuts in warningly.

“Fuck _this!”_ he shouts back, slamming his fist on the table, making half of them jump. He gestures angrily to the intercom. He says this terrible thing that he’s been thinking all fucking day. He says, “He’d still be _with us_ if it weren’t _for her!”_

Dany is about to talk around her migraine. She’s about to ask Drogo to just fucking leave the room because he can’t keep his composure, because he can’t be a professional right now — but she is interrupted by the sound that comes out of the intercom.

It’s loud and ambiguous at first — but then they hear Missandei softly say, _“I know._ I’m _so sorry._ This is all _my fault._ I’m _so sorry.”_ And then they hear another sharp intake of breath — another hiccup as she tries to hold back for a moment.

And then she just loses it and starts crying in pain over the line with them. 

Cersei looks shocked by what she is hearing. Tyrion and Barristan look uncomfortable. Jon looks sympathetic. Drogo looks incensed because _how dare she_ try to solicit sympathy from them after she fucking _lost him._

Dany immediately gestures to Jojen. She quickly says, “Hang tight, Missandei. We’ll follow up with you on next steps in a bit,” right before the line gets severed.

  
  
  
  


After the meeting, Tyrion rushes out to try and secure a diplomatic note requesting for the release of their man back into their custody through his contacts. Tyrion assures Drogo that it’s actually going to be a thinly veiled threat, but that’s how these things work. Drogo angrily thinks that it’s completely shit that Tyrion is good at and it better fucking yield some fucking _results_ this time around. 

Tyrion sighs before he gets back on his phone and runs to his car.

Drogo makes accidentally eye contact with Daenerys, right outside of the glass walls. For a split second, he isn’t scowling at her because he wasn’t primed for it. When he realizes who he is looking at though, his stare turns hateful. 

  
  
  
  


As Grey had predicted, news of his apprehension hits the secure comms channels about an hour and a half after he left. The Valyrian channels state that the person of interest the police have been looking for involved in the slaying of four, almost five people has been apprehended and is in custody. The news doesn’t hit the public right away — as the authorities process him.

Missandei learns that lockdown is loosening up through the secure text line with headquarters. She hears the drone of background noise as she has a very brief conversation with Tyrion about it. Tyrion simply tells her that Sandor just checked in with them. He is half an hour out from getting to her and Lysa Arryn.

In response to that bit of good news, Missandei says, “Okay, but what about Grey? How are we going to get him back?”

  
  
  
  


Quaithe doesn’t even move from her seat at the kitchen table, when Sandor casually walks in from the back door. He also does not look surprised to see her. He just does a quick glance at the house — at the neat row of dried dishes and a little sippy cup on the counter — as well at Missy and Lysa also sitting at the table in silence.

To Quaithe, he says, “Been a long time, huh?” 

She nods at him in acknowledgement. 

And then to Missandei, he quietly says, “How you doing, kiddo?”

She shakes her head slowly in response. 

  
  
  
  


As they untie Lysa from the chair and as Sandor clicks real handcuffs onto her, they learn through their secure channels that the Valyrian cop that tried to fucking kill them has positively identified Grey as his man who stabbed him. That and Grey’s possession of the cop’s gun is enough for the Valyrian authorities to start releasing the news out to the public — that the suspect in multiple slayings has been apprehended by the local law enforcement. They are quick about it in hopes of calming down public tensions. 

Sandor tells Missandei they have to move fast, before her mug gets shown on TV and proclaimed as Grey’s accomplice or something. 

When Missy goes to say goodbye to Grey’s friend and thank her — which feels awkward and terrible all at once — Missy realizes that she doesn’t even know the name of Grey’s friend who risked so much for them. 

“I was good to meet you,” Quaithe says somberly, shaking Missy’s hand. “Have a safe flight home.”

  
  
  
  


The ride to the embassy is pretty uneventful and goes by fairly quickly. Missandei spends the entire time looking out the window with her sore eyes, just in case she spots him.

Lysa is immediately apprehended and turned over to their officers stationed in Valyria, men and women that Missandei has not met before. 

The moment there is a lull, Missandei immediately starts asking Sandor questions about how they plan on getting Grey back. She asks him what is typically the procedure for this sort of thing.

He doesn’t know at all. He only knows that he was pulled out of his job in Lhazosh, and he had to quickly board a plane to Valyria to walk Grey and Missandei out of the city. He only knows what he has been reading — he’s been following the news, so he generally knows what is happening in the city. He didn’t think he’d actually get to either of them at all. He actually thought they were all just dead and that he was being sent on a suicide mission. 

He refrains from telling all of this to Missandei. She is too distraught. This is the first time she has gone through something like this. She doesn’t know that the stink of death permeates this entire job and this entire life. She wasn’t there the last time Sandor was sent to retrieve Grey. He had to wait for hours and hours — just like this time — before getting the go-ahead. He had to encounter the sight of the room and walk through their blood to get to them, as he did the mental math and easily figured out that it all could have been _preventable._

He tells her, “Crying about it doesn’t help,” because he doesn’t know what else to say to her. 

“Yeah?” she says challengingly. “No shit, Sandor. Obviously I don’t think that crying will magically bring him _back._ I just _can’t_ stop, _okay?”_

  
  
  
  


For the next few hours, as the sky grows dark outside, her entire life at the embassy becomes focused on her phone and on the news. 

She is grimly waiting for news of his death, so that her entire world can just collapse in on itself. 

And she is looking for updates from headquarters. 

Sandor is eating a fucking sandwich by himself at a table, like he does not even give a shit about Grey — and she finds that now that she is safely in the custody of her embassy, she is no longer important. She is no longer a person that people are clamoring to get more information from. She is not at all a person that anyone needs to answer to. She is now just an asset that is left waiting as leadership does whatever it is that they are doing right now.

When she gets told that her flight is in an hour, she balks. She didn’t even realize that they were looking for a flight to her. She didn’t even realize that she was getting pulled out of Valyria this fast.

Sandor patiently asks her, “What were you expecting, Missandei? You called for an emergency extraction.”

“I was expecting it to take a fucking _year,”_ she snipes, even as she knows that he is not at all the person she should be mad at. “Everything else that happened this entire fucking day led me to think that I just fucking _live here now!”_

It’s kind of humorlessly funny — and she is so pissed and so scared over Grey — so Sandor understands that. 

He presses his hand to her shoulder. And then uncharacteristically — and it’s uncharacteristic because it’s kind of optimistic — he says, “Kid, we got him back once. That means we can do it again.”

  
  
  
  


Drogo knows that everything that happens after right now is just fucking politicking bullshit. It’s not what he is good at. It’s not his area of expertise. He knows he is useless here right now — and he knows his anger is unproductive. He feels like he needs to _do something._ So he shrugs into his jacket, and he picks up his car keys. 

She is standing by the door that leads to the hallway of elevators. The office has grown busier and busier, as people voluntarily have come in on their day off to try and help, once they heard about Grey and Missandei. 

“Where are you going?” Dany asks — loudly — in front of everyone.

Drogo secures both of his phones in his jacket pocket. He claws some of his hair out of his face. He looks at her symmetrical one. He thinks she’s a real power-tripping bitch who is constantly worried about her own ass. And so he just tells her, “I’m taking the next day off so I can fly to the Summer Isles and tell his parents what happened to their son.” He says this loudly and straight up. He lets the insubordination sink in.

She purses her lips. She is tense as she says, “Drogo — if you leave — if you tell them —”

“You’re a terrible human being, Daenerys,” he cuts in on top of her. He says it matter-of-factly — because it _is_ a fact. “You’re a selfish, self-serving person who doesn’t know how to care about anyone else.” 

The room around them freezes. 

“You just let this _happen!”_ Drogo says, his voice louder now. “You made me hire her even though she is _wildly_ unqualified to do this work! And you just _knew_ that _our_ boy —” and here, he is only gesturing to himself and Selmy, who is steadfastly avoiding eye-contact with the both of them, “— you knew he’d do this. You knew he’d give himself up for _your girl._ You knew that all you needed to do was wait him out long enough. Way to secure the embassy just for _your girl,_ Daenerys. Fucking go to hell, bitch. Hope you’re proud of yourself and what you have done today. You finally got what you wanted. He’s _dead_ now.” 

Dany’s eyes are cold and furious, as she slowly hisses, “You’re _fired_ , Drogo _.”_

“No, I’m not,” he tells her — infuriatingly calm in his matching rage. “I’ll see you on Wednesday, boss.”

  
  
  
  


She is kind of catatonic on the flight home — because she cannot believe that she is _this person._ She can’t believe that she is the kind of person who left her partner behind to die. She can’t believe that he is really gone. She can’t believe that everything has changed in a day. She can’t believe that she was _just_ holding onto him and contemplating a future with him. She can’t believe that her stupid fucking problems in life used to be that he didn’t want to meet her dad _right away._ She can’t believe that this has to end with him thinking that he is alone. 

Her eyes are raw and aching — dry because she is spent — when she disembarks the plane. She goes straight to campus, straight to the twenty fifth floor of the west building. She has Sandor scan her in even though he’s not supposed to — it goes against protocol and is a security breach — but he does it because he feels bad for her. She doesn’t have her card because she has just lost all of her shit in the course of running for her fucking life.   

When she sees Daenerys — and when Dany sees her — Missandei stumbles a step forward, as Dany runs up to her and throws her arms tightly around Missandei’s shoulders. 

Dany is sniffling. She is saying, “Are you okay?”

Missy hugs Dany back. And then she says, “What are we currently doing to get him back? How can I help?”

  
  
  
  


She gets told no details at all. She actually is told to go home and rest. And when she refuses, she is told that if she insists on working, what is useful is to get interviewed and do another info-download so that they don’t lose all of the work of the operation.

  
  
  
  


She doesn’t want to go home and create these half-truths that she will use to explain to her dad why she is home early from her business trip. She doesn’t know how to not break down and tell him that she lost Grey. 

So she takes a detour. Dany is still at work — camped out there for the time being while they try to figure out how to get Grey out — so Missy goes to another friend’s house. She goes to someone that she doesn’t need to lie to. 

Daario’s face is serious and devoid of any smile — for maybe the first time since she has known him. He has been keeping tabs on what is happening — because they all know that something terrible has happened. It’s their new protocol since the first time this happened with Grey. Everyone above a security clearance gets notified of this kind of incident when it happens now.

He sees her face. He says, “Hey.”

  
  
  
  


It is the crack of morning — six in the morning here, three in the morning back in King’s Landing — by the time he arrives at Grey’s parents’ house. He really doesn’t want to scare the shit out of them, but his options are limited. His presence is just liable to scare the shit out of them, regardless. 

They go to sleep early so they are already awake and drinking coffee before work. He has to knock on their door and disturb them.

More lights in the house flip on. He watches as Grey’s dad blinkingly peers out the side window and sees him. And then the door unlatches. And then the door slowly opens.

He sees Grey’s dad with an aluminum bat in his hand.

Grey’s mom immediately says, “Is he okay?”

And then Drogo loses his composure a little bit — because he is exhausted and sick with worry — and Grey’s mom sees that, so she starts collapsing to the ground and crying.

  
  
  
  


She doesn’t want to do much talking. She just wants to do a lot of sitting in silence. She refuses to sleep even though it’s so late. She has reasoned that sleeping would just be — it would be — she just doesn’t deserve to rest after what has happened. 

Daario has to tiredly put all of these words into her mouth around his own yawning, in order for them to kind of carry on a conversation. He tells her these moronically obvious things — like the job is fucking hard on some days, like today. He tells her tough decisions have to be made, and sometimes it’s a choice between a shit decision and another shit decision. He tells her that Grey is going be okay. Grey is the best. Grey is the best of them all. Grey is meant to survive this. Daario tells her that it’s hard to temporarily lose sight of a partner — but Grey will be back soon. He will be back before she even knows it.

It’s when Daario is getting up to refill her mug of tea, that she spots it.

It’s a metal hairpin in the shape of a dragon, sitting innocuously on his coffee table.

  
  
  
  


He wakes up in waves, with each iteration bringing more and more awareness. He wakes up fighting with the drugs, with his mind trapped in his body. He screams at his arms and legs sometimes, willing them to move, but his body is uncooperative.

When he wakes up comprehensively, he startles the armed guard that is posted next to his bed. He bewilderingly stares into the violet eyes of a Valyrian — he doesn’t know this person — and then he tries to raise his arms —

He learns that he is restrained. He is tied down to the bed, by his hands and his feet. He can’t speak through his dry mouth and chapped lips — because there is a breathing tube down his throat. He is in the hospital. He is strapped to a hospital bed.

He is not completely lucid. His brain is still messy and intoxicated from drugs and from nearly a day of fighting off the infection that tried to spread deep into his body. 

He thinks that he is trapped in a butcher’s shop again. He thinks that he is tied down by Bolton again. He thinks that he’s about to die again — 

So he starts to fight — and he starts to cry. He screams around the tube in his throat, and he yanks harshly against the bindings holding him down, rattling the bed — bouncing his body up and pulling out a thick _crack_ from the sound of breaking plastic. He can’t see a thing clearly though the tears — Grey can’t hear the armed guard shouting at him in Valyrian, telling him to calm down or else he will be shot.

It’s an empty threat. They can’t kill him like this. 

Two nurses rush in the midst of his episode and then quickly increase his drip — not too much because that will actually kill him — and then they wait a few seconds for him to loopily drift back to unconsciousness. 

After Grey is under again, they laugh to each other — as the guard next to Grey’s bedside catches his breath and waits for his heartbeat to slow down.

The male nurse tells the guard that it’s a good thing they were nearby. The patient could have broken his own wrist with how hard he was yanking against the restraints. 

The female nurse has a damp sponge and is wiping away the remnants of the tears that streamed down his face as she checks his breathing tube. She mutters that he can probably be taken off the tube once the next round of drugs wear off. 

  
  
  
  



	41. Everyone is scared for Grey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy is really missing her bae and forgoes sleep and like, normal human pleasantries because of this. Drogo is chilling with Grey's folks, and they are just saying sad things to each other. Yara snaps Theon's head off for no reason, mostly because she is bad at feelings. Dany continues being everyone's favorite punching bag because hey, it's real lonely at the top. AND THEN FINALLY, our boy is not unconscious or on the razor-thin brink of death for once. He's awake and a little peppy again. Too bad he's being held against his will and being squeezed by an interrogator.

  
  
  
  


 

 

She’s unable to hide her pain from her dad, so instead of trying to, she just stands in the foyer without her suitcase or Grey, and she tells her dad she hasn’t slept in over a day. She lets him take in her appearance — the clothes she is wearing, the mess of her hair, and her red eyes — and she asks him not to ask questions because she can’t answer them. 

His face falls a little bit, as he cautiously takes a step forward, with a dishtowel still hooked over his forearm. He was making eggs for breakfast — just for himself because he wasn’t expecting her home. He starts to says, “Honey —”

But then she starts tearing up. Her jaw quivers as she opens her mouth to apologize that it has to be this way.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey’s parents don’t feel right about calling in sick and getting substitute teachers assigned to their classrooms just an hour before they are due at school, so they have only a tight fifteen minutes to ask Drogo a bunch of questions that he obliquely answers at their kitchen table. 

The first thing they ask Drogo is if their son is dead. 

Drogo somberly tells them, “Not yet.”

They also ask Drogo where their son is. Drogo cannot tell them this with specificity. He just vaguely tells them that Grey is somewhere east. They want to know if their son is hurt in addition to being captured and imprisoned. Drogo confirms to them that their son is hurt. With hesitation, Drogo tells them that Grey got shot. But the bullet didn’t hit anything vital. It grazed his stomach.

None of it is actually comforting at all to Grey’s parents. 

As Grey’s mom says, “Oh my God,” Grey’s dad says, “What! What does that mean — how did that — how could you let this happen to _ my son? Again?” _

Drogo shakes his head. He says, “I’m sorry — I don’t know how this happened again. I am so sorry.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They all want her to take some time off, probably because they are worried about her mental faculties — but fuck them all, she is going to work. 

She has to be cleared to go into the field again, so she makes an appointment with psych. She tries to strongarm her way into an early appointment even though there are no slots with Dr. Tyrell. The only schedule that gives a little bit is Dr. Tarly’s, so she grimly tells the scheduler that she would like to get evaluated by him as soon as possible. 

In his office, she doesn’t cry. Not anymore. She was relieved to be able to leave the house after lying down on her bed for a few hours. Her dad keeps assuming terrible things, and he keeps assuming wrong for the time being. 

He keeps acting as if she was sexually assaulted, for instance. She doesn’t have the capacity to correct him without giving away too much of what actually happened. It’s less of a burden on her to not be around him right now. She wonders if how she currently feels was how her dad felt — when he first learned that the love of his life was going to imminently be taken from him by cancer. She can’t ask him that, though. She just now knows that losing a mother feels different from losing someone like Grey. 

She only cries when she is by herself now. She shuts it down while she is at work and around other people because she owes it to Grey, to be  _ better. _ She owes it to him, to be here and be ready and prepared because they  _ are _ going to get him  _ back. _

Her eyes are dry but still stinging, as she looks into Sam’s face and feels nothing inside, as he tells her that he’s so sorry for what she went through. She’s not sorry for what she went through. She’s sorry for what Grey went through and is continuing to go through. 

She can see that he is having a hard time with this himself. But she now knows that what Sandor said was right. Crying and being sad is indulgent and does not bring him back. 

So she starts. She says. “Yesterday morning, he and I woke up in bed together at about eight o’clock. We talked for a few minutes. And then we heard Lysa Arryn screaming from the master bedroom. He got out of bed first and started running down the hall.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


While Grey’s parents are at work, Drogo nurses a cold cup of coffee, chainsmokes on their front porch, watches the road for cars, takes short naps restlessly, and stays tapped into the secure channels.

There is no news. There are no updates. He thinks that this is a lot like the last time this happened: frustratingly slow, frustratingly dehumanizing, and frustratingly mundane as his heart wants to explode from all of the  _ waiting  _ while Grey is  _ dying  _ somewhere far from them.   

Drogo thinks that the horizon and the sky is actually really pretty here. He realizes that he is never in the Isles for fun or pleasure — he is always here to grimly work. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Sam tells her that he is on the fence about clearing her for work again, but he’s going to clear her as long as she stays at a desk for a little bit. Missandei is actually completely fine with that. She would rather sit at a desk and sift through a mess of data in the Valyrian language. That is probably going to be where she’ll be most useful until they get him back. She is going to see if she can get temporarily assigned to Jojen’s team.

She thanks Sam for his efficiency in this matter as she stands. His eyes are sad as he follows her up. 

As he walks her to the door, he tells her, “I’m going to take a day or two off myself. I’ve been thinking a lot lately — I’ve been thinking if it was the right thing to do, to clear him to go back into the field when I did. I knew he needed this job — and maybe I let that influenced me too much.”

“He  _ needs _ this job,” Missandei corrects.

Sam pauses — a little confused.

“Present tense,” she succinctly says, squaring her shoulders. “Don’t talk about him in the past tense. And he  _ is _ great at this job. You were right to clear him. Don’t think otherwise.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


When Theon sees his sister for the first time in a week, he doesn’t know what has happened — there’s no way for him to know because he’s not employed by the organization anymore. So he smiles at her and he hands her the cup of coffee that he bought for her as he lightly blows on the mouthpiece of his cup. 

He and Ruby have decided to move in together. He’s excited to tell his sister because she’s been really impatient with the rate of his “healing.” She constantly compares him to Grey — and she doesn’t intend to be hurtful about it — she is just callous. She constantly tells him that Grey went through the exact same shit that he did, and Grey isn’t all fucked in the brain and scared of his own shadow because of it. She has been quietly calling him weak for the past couple of years.

And he understands that she is worried about him. He thinks his news will alleviate her concern.

He says, “Sis, guess what!”

_ “What!” _ she snaps, with the kind of viciousness that is completely unwarranted because he hasn’t  _ done _ anything to her at all yet.  _ “What  _ do  _ you want now!” _

Theon says,  _ “Whoa.  _ Is everything okay?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei cannot stand the way any of them are looking at her and talking to her. Robb and Gendry look at her with their sad puppy eyes. Alayaya has been giving her short shoulder rubs whenever they pass each other in the hallways. Kojja keeps studiously avoiding the elephant in the room and instead, keeps calling her, “Champ.” Like, “You got it, champ.” Even Bronn is being extra nice to her.

She is pretty over it. She doesn’t even know why they are being so careful with her. Do they feel bad because she almost died? Or do they feel bad that she has lost him?

During lunchtime, she changes her mind about sitting with them. She picks up her tray, and she just moves to another table to sit by herself without saying a word of explanation.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Drogo straightens in his seat when he sees Grey’s parents’ sedans individually make their way back to the house — three hours earlier than expected. 

And then, in explanation, as Grey’s dad presses his hand to the burning metal of the hood of the car — he tells Drogo, “I can’t think about anything else, except for what you told me.” 

He is explaining to Drogo that they left their classes early because they can’t work right now. He tells Drogo that he and his wife have spent the entire day reading the news, trying to figure out where their son is being held — but the world is too vast.

Grey’s parents gather together some dishes of food — because they still feel compelled to be hospitable — and they make Drogo repeat himself over and over. They make Drogo tell them again, everything that he can tell them about what is happening with their son. Drogo breaches security a little bit, with the specificity in the snippets he is leaking out. He tells them that Grey was out of the country on an assignment that went south and became really dangerous. Grey kept his partner alive. And then Grey gave himself up for the good of the team. The organization is currently doing  _ everything  _ it can to get Grey back.

Drogo wonders if he’s lying to Grey’s parents — when he says that.  

Then, Drogo repeats it all over again, when Grey’s older brother arrives at the house and starts to tear open the wound again, by reacting and processing the news in real time — all over again. He is in disbelief at first, as his mother tells him that it’s real, that it really happened. He looks at Drogo as if Drogo is a stranger — and to be real, Drogo  _ is _ a stranger to them. Grey’s brother keeps muttering that it’s so bizarre — how little they know about Grey now.  

In response to this, Drogo just says, “I’m sorry,” because he  _ is _ sorry — that it has to be this way.

It’s hours and hours later, when they can finally move past the terribleness of what is happening — that they can start clearing dishes and talking a little bit about their memories. Grey’s mom breaks down a little bit, every time Drogo tries to  _ give them something _ back about their son, every time Drogo tries to explain to them the kind of person that Grey is, at work and in personal relationships, so that in some way, they could have a little bit more and more of their son back. He tells them that Grey is funny. He tries to repeat some of Grey’s jokes, but they all just sound mean and unnecessarily cruel — and Grey’s parents don’t get why the jokes are jokes or why they are funny — but they see something of their kid in it all so they laugh out loud, too — in a sad kind of relief. And it makes Drogo laugh out this ache even though it feels wrong to laugh.  

His mom keeps saying, “It was a mistake to let him go,” over and over. She means that it was a mistake to send him overseas for school.  

She also keeps bitterly saying, “I’m going to go to the grave with so many regrets,” with tears in her eyes. 

She asks them, “What kind of mother loses her child like this?” and it’s a rhetorical question — clearly — but Grey’s brother breaks down over it and tells her that she is a good mother. 

She says, “I am not.”

  
  
  
  
  


Dany has been keeping tabs on Missandei — so she knows that Missandei has been in the office with Jojen’s team for fifteen hours straight. It’s late when Dany makes her way over to that building, with her ankles sore and aching from standing all day. 

She and Tyrion are due on a flight to Valyria in the morning to meet with their ambassador in person. She still has to pack. Nonetheless, she knocks on the open door of the office Missandei is working in. 

She says, “Hey, have you eaten dinner yet?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey’s family members are so polite and so regimented — like how Grey is. They all thank Drogo before they retire to bed, before Grey’s brother leaves to go back home to his own house. Grey’s parents are also deeply responsible people. They are going to try to go to work again tomorrow.

Drogo feels like he just broke this entire family with his news, so Drogo doesn’t think he deserves their thanks. He and  _ the organization _ keep fucking allowing this to happen to Grey. 

Grey’s bedroom is the only spare room that is made up for guests. Drogo can’t stand to sleep in Grey’s bed, so Drogo sleeps on the floor. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei was just planning on letting it go because it’s none of her business and people are allowed their secrets — but after she tells Dany that she’s not hungry and that she’d rather keep working — after Dany insistently  _ tells her _ that she  _ has to eat  _ because she needs to keep her energy up  _ — _

There is just a sound or a quality in Daenerys’ tone that rubs Missandei the wrong way. 

Missandei tries again to end it. She flatly says, “I’m fine. Really.”

“Come on,” Dany says, trying to sound like she is cajoling and not like she is bullying. “I can order something for us. It’ll be quick. You should take a break.”

“I’m fine,” Missandei repeats. “I’m not hungry.”

“He wouldn’t want for you to —”

And that  _ gets _ to her. “Please don’t talk about him like that,” Missy cuts in. “Please don’t assume what he’d want. Please don’t use him as a device to get me to do something that you want me to do.”

Dany is taken aback by this. She recoils a little bit.

“And please don’t talk about him as if you know him,” Missandei adds. “Because you  _ don’t _ know him. Not anymore, at least.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


After he regains full and consistent consciousness and is not so fucking  _ nuts _ anymore, after he can dependably breathe on his own because he’s not so drugged up — he is put into chains, with handcuffs connected to his feet — so that he can’t run past the armed guard that is  _ always _ watching him. 

He is made to sit at a table with his hands tied down. 

He thinks this is a bit much. What do they think he is going  _ to do? _

He also sees that it’s a bit historical. He tries not to draw too many parallels between his current situation and the centuries of enslavement his people suffered under the Valyrian empire. 

But this shit still just makes him so fucking  _ mad. _

A Valyrian female interviewer-slash-interrogator sits down across from him — she looks a lot like Daenerys, and Grey doesn’t know if this was done on purpose or if everyone in this country just looks the same — and in the Common Tongue, she starts asking him questions. She is good at her job, so he quickly understands why he is being placed in front of her. 

She tells him what his situation is. She tells him he is being charged for four murders and one attempted murder. She tells him that one of the people he is accused of killing is Jon Arryn, CEO of Arryn Capital Holdings. She tells him that there are multiple eyewitnesses who have spotted him together with Jon Arryn the day before Arryn was killed. She tells him that she knows he was spotted at a golf course, for instance. 

She tells him that the one lone survivor of his attacks, Alyn Valysar, is an off-duty law enforcement officer and there are multiple eyewitnesses that saw him attack Alyn Valysar at the motel where Officer Valysar was found. She tells him, “As you may have gathered, the Valyrian courts are not lenient on would-be cop-killers. At all.”

In response to that, he says, “Okay.”

Grey knows this is a bullshit dog and pony show designed to scare him. He does not plan on talking. He does not point out that fucking Alyn is a fucking dirty cop, and that it’s probably not that hard to press into his background to find the grime. They probably know he’s a dirty cop, but they are probably bent on protecting him because that’s how this shit  _ works. _

Grey does not point out that the eyewitnesses were all hiding in motel rooms when Alyn tried to kill him and Missandei — so he doesn’t know how they were able to fucking see what was happening.  He does not point out that the eyewitnesses were probably bought off, and they will probably perjure themselves for coin because they are desperate and vulnerable themselves — and it isn’t a hard position, to come down  _ for _ the Valyrian cop versus coming down  _ for _ the dark foreigner in Valyria. 

Grey also does not point out that a toxicology report must have been done on Jon Arryn, and the results of that are probably just being withheld from him right now in the hopes that he will freak out. 

Grey knows that he didn’t kill anyone. He purposely didn’t kill anyone at all. He could have — but he  _ didn’t. _

He also knows that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all what he did or didn’t do — not to them. He knows what they see what they look at him. He knows that he is fucked. He knows that he will pay penance for something he didn’t do because that is his lot in his life and he has been doing it already for years now. He’s been trying to proclaim his sanity for years to people in power. It did not matter because nothing he says about himself ever matters. Nothing he ever believes about himself fucking matters to people in power. And now he gets to fruitlessly speak up for his own innocence. Even though it does not fucking  _ matter. _

“We also know what government you are employed under,” his interviewer says. “We know that you were in this country under an assumed name — doing  _ unsanctioned  _ work. Even if you hadn’t killed — you are not in a good position to begin with, sir.”

He doesn’t let how he feels show on his face. But he does quietly ask, “What are you wanting from me?”

She smiles. She says, “Just information. Firstly — just your name. Your _ real name.” _

“No.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	42. Dany fails

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this episode, Dany and Missy have a heart to heart about a boy! Tyrion does what he does best, which is try and get Dany to stop being such a crazy-beans emotional woman all the time so she can be the best leader she can be. Dany tries to get Grey back through the normal sort of channels. Drogo is all up in his feelings. Missandei is real depressed and her family is freaked out over it. Grey continues chilling under house arrest.

  
  
  


 

Missandei ends up apologizing to Dany. She tells Dany that she’s sorry for being so unprofessional just then. She awkwardly links her hands together in front of her body, as she makes this obvious statement. She tells Dany that she’s really, _really_ worried about Grey.

This is the sort of thing that Dany does not really want to hear — not right now at least. Dany does not want to hear verbal confirmation of what she has already figured out too stupidly late — that this is really personal for Missandei because Missandei is in love with him. 

These kinds of conversations are hard to have because they require an embarrassing amount of vulnerability and Dany hasn’t really been about that for the past decade. They used to be on more equal footing when they were in college together. Things started to change even though they promised each other their friendship would never change once they started working — especially once they started working together — once Missandei started working _for_ Daenerys. 

Missandei realizes that the flow of information usually only gets passed one way between the two of them. This is why it feels a little bit like risky insubordination, when she whisper-talks and asks Dany for the honest truth:

“Is it really the organization’s intention — to get him back? Or are they just going to put on a show before they — before —” Missandei pauses, blinking rapidly as she stops herself from saying the words.

“Jon wants him back,” Dany says, her voice even and calm and professional and a little cold even. “Cersei says she’s concerned about the cost of getting him back, but I think for now, she also sees that it’s prudent to move fast in securing him because he is a high-level asset, with what he knows about the organization and his security clearance.”

“Okay,” Missandei says softly, slowly, working over the really clipped and businesslike response in her head. It’s not what she expected, but she doesn’t know what she expected. 

And then cautiously, Missy says, “Jon doesn’t even know him.” Missandei is trying to ask Dany if Jon Snow’s allegiance could be a fickle thing, if Jon will change his mind and let Cersei cut Grey loose.

“Jon doesn’t need to know Grey to know what the right thing to do is,” Dany says simply.

“And you?” Missandei asks. “Do you want him back?”

Dany looks pained for a moment, before she says, “You know I do. Of course I want him back.”

“Okay.”

Dany’s about to leave when Missandei releases her parting shot. Missandei doesn’t really understand the logic of Dany’s hypocrisy — why Daenerys decided to dissuade Missandei against pursuing a relationship with him under the altar of professionalism and feminism and the stigma that follows a woman working in law enforcement who sleeps with her partner — when Dany was sleeping with Daario herself. At this juncture, with Missandei in her current mood, she just doesn’t give a shit what Dany’s reasons were. 

She just wants Dany to know. 

So she says, “I love him. I need for him to be back and safe. I need _for you_ to _get him back_ — and not for me and not because it’s what I want — but because he doesn’t _deserve_ what has happened to him and what’s _been_ happening to him. He’s a good person. And he has sacrificed so much. I don’t think it’s right for us to let him die thinking that we just abandoned him, that we didn’t do everything in our power to get him back.”

 

  
  
  


They are all exhausted and weary as they say goodbye to each other, with Drogo standing barefoot on the front porch and Grey’s parents heading to their cars with thermoses. Drogo assures them that he will call them and let them know of any updates on their son as the days unfold. 

Grey’s parents keep soliciting a timeline from him on just _when_ his government will get their son back safe and sound. It’s completely an impossible question to answer with so many variables, but he understands that they need a glimmer of hope to look toward, so he has reluctantly told them that the last time this sort of thing happened with Grey, it took about five days to get Grey back. 

His mother whispered it back to herself in front of Drogo — and then again in the dark with her hand grasping tightly onto her husband’s hand. She has told herself that she can make it five days. 

  
  
  
  
  


After they get off the plane, after they tiredly push past the throng of people loitering around the gate, after Dany makes Tyrion watch her carry-on luggage as she goes pee real quick because she didn’t want to use the plane’s toilet — her gaze falls out towards broad windows outside of baggage claim that just reveal a lot of concrete and taxis.

“Any of it look familiar?” Tyrion inquires politely, raising his arm to flag down a cab.

“No,” she says. “I actually wasn’t born here. I never lived here.”

  
  
  
  
  


During the day at work, she works closely with Jojen and musters a remarkable amount of endurance, just sifting through pages and pages of data. She is being indulged in this because Jojen feels bad for her and Drogo isn’t currently around to yell at her for being a waste of space who took his favorite away and left him with her meager self.

Alayaya has taken her place on prostitute duty, until Missy gets reevaluated and cleared to go back into the field. She neatly runs into Yaya after hours, with Yaya wearing a skin-tight purple dress and black boots. She says, “Oof!” as they collide in the doorway. 

She feels Yaya’s hands on her arms, steadying her. Missy feels like she ought to apologize to Yaya for forcing Yaya to demote herself and go below her pay grade just because Missandei had a near-death experience. She is sorry for just inconveniencing Yaya’s life.

Missy mutters, “Sorry,” as in sorry for the bump.

“No big,” Alayaya mumbles, already moving on, already continuing down the hallway.

  
  
  
  
  


She patiently takes a seat on the left side of the couch as Tyrion occupies the right side in the seating area that they were directed to. Soon enough, a housemaid puts down a tray of small cups, a steaming iron teapot, and a plate of biscuits.

Tyrion hasn’t eaten in hours and he shunned the shitty airplane food, so he immediately reaches for a biscuit and is nibbling on it as Kevan Lannister arrives, thanks his housemaid, waits for her to leave the room, and then greets Daenerys and Tyrion as they stand up.

“Ambassador,” Tyrion says, shaking Kevan’s hand. “Uncle.”

The sounds of the honorific sounds a little loaded and implicating coming out of Tyrion’s sardonic mouth, so Kevan bristles a little bit. He touches his shirt with a hand as he gestures for them all to sit down. He says, “Tyrion. How is your father?” 

“He sends his regards,” Tyrion says.

  
  
  
  
  


His captors keep telling him that they are treating him well and he’s pretty lucky for it because murderers like him don’t usually get treated so well in Valyria, but they are magnanimous because they understand that the situation is delicate.

He is always chained up. He is constantly watched. He cannot even go to the toilet by himself. His guard has become pretty familiar with his anatomy and while his guards have been professional enough not to comment on it — his guards generally do not talk to him at all — he is pretty sure they are probably mocking him behind his back.

He gets to stay in a nice room though, with a bed and with a table and chair and a settee. He gets to lounge on plushy Valyrian upholstery in his chains, so that is nice of them, he supposes.

They feed him food that he has to eat with his hands, because they do not trust him with any utensils. He mostly eats bread, cured meats, and cheese. 

When he is sat down in front of her again, she knows his name, which he finds bothersome but it is probably the natural procedure of things. She is amused as she calls him “Torgo Nudho,” because she knows the origins of his name. To Valyrians, his name is telling and it relays a fair bit of information about where he comes from and who he comes from. 

He understands that she knows his name because his government had to reveal it to the Valyrian government in order to press for diplomatic immunity for him.

“What was your business here in Valyria?” she asks. “Why were you here? Why golf?”

She is trying to trick him into admitting that he was here for business reasons and not in his capacity as an embassy employee. 

He generally doesn’t answer her questions. His non-engagement with her has not resulted in clear punishment yet.

  
  
  
  
  


“They are unwilling to enforce the protocol,” Kevan tells Daenerys and Tyrion mildly. “They assert that he was here on a business visa. They noted that the staff list of the embassy was edited to include his name and his partner’s name. They believe that we are trying to pull the wool over their eyes.”

“What they believe and how they feel doesn’t matter now, does it?” Dany says. “The fact of the matter is that, legally, he has diplomatic immunity, and he needs to be transferred into our possession _immediately,_ per the rules of the convention. It is _clear-cut.”_

 “They don’t see it that way,” Kevan says. And then, lowering his voice a little bit, possibly because most of his staff are Valyrian or possibly because he is empathizing with them. “It is already all over the news,” he says softly. “It’s going to look really bad for them with their people if they let him walk out scot free. He’s a foreigner — and you know how insular this country is —”

“Yes, yes,” Dany says dismissively. “They hate the idea of foreigners tainting Valyrian purity. They just want cheap foreign labor and none of the messy foreign genetics. I am familiar.” She barely takes a pause. “It does not matter. _Legally,_ he _must_ be given over to us. Are you _conveying_ this to them?”

Kevan hesitates, which makes Dany think that he completely _has not_ been conveying this to the Valyrians.

He thinks that she is being young, naive, and bullheaded about this. He believes that the situation is delicate and they have to do their best to preserve life and peace.

She sneeringly thinks that he is being a weak pacifist.

“I want to meet with the officials while we are here,” she tells him. “Please secure a meeting. I also want to see him.”

“Him? You mean —”

“Yes, Kevan,” she interrupts impatiently. “Torgo Nudho, our man who is wrongly detained for something he did not do.”

  
  
  
  
  


After the fairly disastrous meeting with the ambassador, Tyrion tries to cheer the both of them up by telling a taxi to take them to someplace with exorbitantly decadent food. 

In response to _the look_ Daenerys is casting him, Tyrion holds a hand up and tries to signal for her to cool her jets. He tells her that he’s paying out of his own pocket, don’t worry. Also, neither of them have had a decent meal in days. He reasonably tells her that punishing themselves with starvation doesn’t help Grey any.

She thinks that his rationalizations are annoying and unnecessary for her to listen to. She just gazes out the window at the skyscrapers and she wonders if this was the sort of view her dad and mother gazed up at, when they were alive and young. 

  
  
  
  
  


They are keeping him really isolated. They have searched and scanned his naked body for any tracking device, subcutaneous or otherwise. They have put him in a nice-looking room with one window that is heavily frosted, so light comes in, but everything outside is blurred and unclear. He has no computer, no internet, no TV. He has no books. He just spends hours and hours with a guard standing at his door, watching him. 

“We also know what government you are employed under,” his interviewer tells him, trying to stir some panic in him. 

She is smiling at him. 

“We know your name now. How long do think it will be before we learn where you born — the hospital, the neighborhood? How long do you think it will be before we learn the names and addresses of your loved ones? What will they think about what _you have done?”_

He is looking down at the table, down at his hands. He thinks that this is utter bullshit. They currently don’t have much leverage over him, other than his desire to be free, so now they are threatening him in this way. 

  
  
  
  
  


She learns when Drogo is back in office because Jojen just comes out and blurts it to her as a warning. Jojen, who listened in on Drogo’s enraged breakdown of her failings across the secure conference line and listened to her subsequent emotional outpour over the same line, feels sorry and kind of worried for her.

She thinks it’s paternalistic. She is _fine._ She currently doesn’t give many shits about how angry Drogo is with her. What is he going to _do?_ He can’t fire her. He just can force her on desk duty but guess what? Everyone already agrees — she should currently be on desk duty.

Drogo doesn’t even acknowledge her in the morning team meeting. Other than the tense and somber mood of it all — it is largely normal. They go over updates. They do check-ins. They discuss resources, budgets, and next steps.

When she arrives home to sleep for a while — her dad stops her at the stairs with his hand at her elbow. She’s only been back for a few days, but he has never been so scared for her before in his entire life. 

Her brothers are over at her house — after months and months of blowing her off when she asked them about dinner at her place with their dad. Her brothers are acting like they just casually stopped by to have a beer with their dad — acting like this is a normal thing they do. 

Her dad softly says, “Do you want to have dinner with us?”

“I’m tired,” she tells him, looking down at the hand on her elbow. “I think I’m just going to rest.”

“Just five minutes,” he asks, pleading with her a little bit. “Just have a quick snack and then you can go to bed.”

  
  
  
  
  


Their visit is completely overseen and supervised. It is crazy to him that the first time he gets to talk so directly with Daenerys in over a year is in this context. His eyes take in her blank face and her hair, which has changed in the time that they have not been in direct contact with one another. 

Tyrion tries to alleviate the tension with a soft statement. He says to Grey, “You look good.”

Dany snaps her eyes right to him. She says, “Is that _a joke?”_

Tyrion’s eyes fall to the metal around Grey’s wrists and the drab uniform that he is being made to wear. He looks incarcerated.

It actually wasn’t a joke at all. It was actually a thoughtless statement about how Grey looks relatively _healthy_ , how Grey doesn’t _appear_ like he’s in the midst of healing from a gunshot wound. 

“They send a nurse to look at me once a day,” Grey explains succinctly.

“Are they treating you well?”

Again, another stupid question from Tyrion. Even Grey’s eyes fall down to the cuffs on his hands. 

Grey blandly responds with, “It could be worse.”

 

  
  
  


She doesn’t really know how she should act around him. He is a person who is actually a rather permanent and prominent fixture in her brain, but she would not qualify them as being especially close. It does not come naturally to her, to do what Tyrion is doing.

Tyrion is trying to comfort Grey with words. 

Tyrion is ducking his voice down, trying to afford them the smallest bit of privacy in this room full of people. Tyrion is telling Grey to hang on — to keep hanging on — because they know who he is as a person — they know he is honorable — and they are going to get him out. Tyrion tells Grey not to worry about a thing at home. They are going to take care of everything. 

It’s vague enough — by necessity — that Grey has to wonder what the fuck that even _means._

Tyrion means that he put Meera in charge of maintaining the logistics of Grey’s life at home. Tyrion means that Grey will still have an apartment and his utilities will still be on and his mail will not be overflowing in his mailbox, when he gets home.

Their time together is too short — the purpose of which is just to show Dany and Tyrion that their man is fine. The minutes they have together isn’t enough for Grey to feel angry with Dany over shit that happened in the past and it’s not enough for Dany to give any sort of explanation for it. 

He has to ask though — because he can’t help it. 

His heart is pounding in his chest because he is preparing himself for the very fucking worst, as he softly asks, “How is everyone? Is everyone okay?”

This is when Tyrion realizes that of course Grey doesn’t know Missandei’s or Sandor’s statuses and of course he has to be wondering about his colleagues’ safety. 

Tyrion quickly says, “They’re fine. They made it back without incident.”

“Oh,” Grey says quietly. “Okay.”

“They miss you,” Dany breaks in suddenly, staring at his face now, making direct eye contact with him now. “They want you back very much. So please, hold on for them.”

  
  
  
  
  


She puts on a show at dinner, just for her dad and her brothers. For their sake, she puts up with the labor of sitting at a table with them and making conversation about her nieces and nephews and all of these reminders that there is an entire world that exists outside of the microcosm of her grief. She understands that they think they are being helpful by trying to distract her from whatever it is that has got her like this — but they are men and she finds that she _really_ misses her mom, even in moments like this.

Because her mom would just _know._ If her dad got to sporadically pal around with her like she was his little buddy — her mom got to deal with her changing moods, day by day. Her mom got to see her struggles with making friends, with her own social awkwardness, with the various kinds of ostracism she experienced for one reason or another — and her response to it because she is sensitive. If her mom were still alive right now, her mom would know that she has lost something really meaningful and precious — and it’s not her virtue. 

At night in her bed, she tortures herself in the dark. She plays the what-if game a lot. She imagines what her life would be like now, if she never bothered him with her admiration of him. She imagines what his life would be like right now, if he was never burdened with her shortcomings. He would probably be at home, in his apartment or having dinner with friends, safe and happy. 

She remembers what his face looks like when he smiles — it glows — and she thinks that she is stupid for letting herself self-indulgently remember that.

She also just goes for broke — and she imagines what their life would look like, if they were just safe and happy together and he just allowed her to be in love with him. She could be the one who was having dinner with him, for instance. She could be the one who was hanging out in his apartment with him. She’d make him laugh. She’d crawl into bed with him afterward, and she’d hold onto him tightly all night. 

  
  
  
  
  


There is just a fundamental disagreement here — and many many years of history and context dragging them down. There are also a lot of years of excessive pride dragging them all down.

The Valyrians refuse to release him. They tell her they do not believe he has diplomatic immunity. They tell her what their people deserve — and that is to see their justice system play out. 

She stops herself from sneering. She stops herself from ruining this for him by getting angry and insulting them. She doesn’t tell them that they are fucking covering for a dirty cop because he is Valyrian and they are _burning_ her man alive because he is _not_ Valyrian. She doesn’t tell them that they are just cowardly fucks who are trying to save face by sacrificing a man’s life. 

In turn, they don’t tell her that she is arrogant and she _dares_ to have the audacity to come onto their land and _tell them_ what they _have to_ do? She and her government have the audacity to continue conducting covert operations in Valyrian borders after the explicit promise and agreement that the numbers would get scaled back. They don’t trust her or her government because they don’t keep their word — they are honorless liars and opportunists.

Tyrion is running after Daenerys as she quickly walks to their waiting car. 

He is saying, “Dany —”

“Contact the state department right now,” she barks at Tyrion. “Tell them that we _must_ cut off all communications between that department and the Valyrian embassy in King’s Landing. _Today.”_

“Don’t you think that is a little counterproductive?”

This — and the immense pressure and stress of the last few days — causes her to caustically snap at him. She shouts, “Does anyone in your family _do_ anything besides _cover your own asses!”_

Impressively, Tyrion does not recoil at this. He also doesn’t take that much offense. 

He just makes it into a joke. To relieve some of his own stress.  

In a deadpan, he says, “Hey, we don’t just cover our own asses. Sometimes we ruin lives, too.” 

  
  
  
  
  


Missandei’s dad is surprised and also not that surprised, when he opens the front door after hearing the doorbell and finds Daenerys Targeryan standing on the front stoop.

He mildly says, “Oh, hello, dear. It’s been a while. How are you?” He tries to recall and he thinks that maybe the last time he saw her was the time after his wife’s funeral, before he moved in with Missandei.

Dany mutters, “Yeah, I’m sorry. And I’m fine.” 

She used to spend a lot of time with Missandei and her parents — even going on family vacations with them — when she was younger and less of a flaming dickwad asshole bitch. She used to feel really touched over being included because she was lacking in the experience of having a real family and they knew that and were trying to give her some of that.

“No problem. I know you’re a real busy person,” he says smoothly, stepping out of the way to let her enter the house. “Congratulations, by the way. I hear you’re just kicking so much ass — from Missy.”

“Ah, well,” Dany says — trying to figure out a way to end this conversation already because it is making her sad — and she also doesn’t have much time for this. She had to get back to headquarters right away and schedule meetings with Jon and Cersei.

Missandei’s dad intuits this. He knows that she’s not here to shoot the shit with him. He says, “She’s upstairs in her bedroom. She might be sleeping.”

  
  
  
  
  


Dany spent the better part of a year running away from her guilt and her own culpability in what happened to him — by avoiding him. She spent the better part of the year being a coward under the auspices of busy leadership. She engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate because she hated herself and sometimes she could let go of and forget this fact a little bit — when she was wrapped up in someone else.

She is here though, because she _has to_ be better than fucking _that_ , from here on out. She has to be better than who she has been.

She looks steadily at Missandei — who sits up in her bed with a book in her lap. Her friend’s eyes are red, and the room smells like it hasn’t been aired out in days. 

Missandei’s surprise gives way to confusion.

So Dany bluntly says, “I’m sorry. We were unsuccessful. They are not letting him go.”

“W-what?”

Missandei looks shell-shocked. So Dany repeats. She says, “We weren’t able to get him back. They insist on charging him for the killings.”

 _“What?”_  

“I’m sorry,” Dany says, and all she can sound is perfunctory and blunt. This is why she often works with Tyrion. He is better at this kind of stuff — at delivering world-upending news to the loved ones of the people they have to leave behind. 

So Missandei starts to cry. She covers her face with her hands momentarily as the words sink in. Dany stands awkwardly at the foot of the bed and watches this. She listens as, out loud, Missandei talks to herself and insists that he is innocent and he didn’t _do_ any of the things he is accused of. 

And here, Dany says, “Are you sure?”

Because she needs to know all of the facts in order to figure out the best way to get him back — because she didn’t realize that Missandei felt this way about him and if Missandei feels so strongly about him, maybe Missandei will lie for him, thinking that it’s the right and only thing to do — to get him back. 

Dany is not really judging or condemning exactly, but that’s how Missandei interprets it. 

Missandei turns furious —  all at once. She stares at Dany like she doesn’t even know who Dany _is_ anymore. 

Missandei says, “How _dare_ you say that.” She doesn’t even give Dany’s shitty question or Dany herself the dignity of a real response. She actually just says, “Please get out of my house.”

  
  
  
  
  


Dany walks down the stairs fairly quickly, her heels pounding on the steps and her legs flexing as she holds tightly onto the bannister. 

Missandei’s dad is surprised that her visit is over so quick and that she is leaving so fast — but he still grasps her elbows and pulls her in for a quick hug. He pats her on the shoulder blades and tells her, “Don’t be a stranger, okay?”

Once she’s safely ensconced in her car again — once she’s about two blocks away from Missandei’s house — that’s when the activities of the last week really catches up to her. Losing Grey the first time. Fighting Cersei at every turn. Dealing with Jon’s desire for more information when they don’t have the luxury of time. Drogo being a complete asshole like he thinks that he is the only fucking person in the world in pain over this. Losing Grey again. Losing Missandei’s respect. 

Her chest kind of cracks open a little bit while she’s at a stoplight — and just so much grief and regret starts flooding out — and she just starts sobbing into her steering wheel, so hard that she can’t even see anymore.

Long seconds pass, until the car behind her honks impatiently at her because the light has turned green.

  
  
  
  
  


The next week, when he is sat in front of the interviewer again, she looks so happy to see him, and he is like — fucking great. What now?

She tells him, “Your name is Torgo Nudho. You were born in Ebonhead, in the Summer Isles. You have a degree in literature and in criminal justice from King’s Landing University. You became a citizen at age eighteen, when you were recruited to work for their government. Your father’s name is Kamau, and your mother’s name is Sanaa. They are both schoolteachers.”

  


 

 

 


	43. Grey tries to kill himself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey's terrible life continues not getting better. Missy continues being terrible at moving on without the future love of her life. Drogo hates his boy's girl because he is sexist and she is a living reminder of tragic shit. Bronn really hates his new project at work. Cersei's coworker sucks. Kevan has a young blond woman constantly getting on his ass — after she listens to NONE of his advice. Everyone is telling Dany she is wrong about everything. She is like, no fuck that. And then in a major big-dick moment, Dany lights everything on fire. Is it too late though?

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey really doesn’t think it’s normal operations, for Valyrians to fucking threaten to send killers to his parents’ home and dispatch them in cold blood, but what the fuck does he even know what is normal anymore?

Outwardly, he continues to stay fairly non-responsive.

But in actuality, he is pretty pissed at himself and how fucking  _ stupid  _ he continues to be. He has finally realized that having a guard around him twenty-four-seven, in addition to the chains, is not at all to protect them from his weak, puny ass. It’s definitely so he can’t kill himself. They wanted to keep him alive so that they can fucking present him with this terrible shit, and he didn’t see it coming at all. 

He was well-trained for this. They all are at the organization. They all undergo a lot of psychological conditioning for this. It is ingrained into their mind that the lives of many supersedes the death of a few. This is how they rationalize what they do. This is how they all sleep at night. This is why they are all so patriotic. This is why he never wanted to tell his parents anything about what he was really doing at work. He just didn’t want them to know this terrible thing about him. He wanted them to stay safe. He reasoned that they could stay safe if they didn’t know anything about him — because it meant they had no stories to tell. This is why he sacrificed his relationship with them. 

He already knows he has to call the Valyrians’ bluff. He cannot sell out his adopted country — not because he is loyal to it because  _ fuck that —  _ but because he has high security clearance what he knows affects  _ so many  _ innocent people. He cannot save his parents by selling out an innumerable amount of innocent people. 

Presently, he sees only one viable option. He can only save them by killing himself in a timely manner. If he is dead, presumably the Valyrians would leave his loved ones alone.

It’s like his interviewer  _ knows _ what he is thinking — because she smiles at him. 

“Can I have some water?” he asks politely.

“Sure,” she says.

“How much time do I have to decide?”

“How much time do you need?”

“I get to pick? That’s strange. I pick six months?”

She smiles at him again. She doesn’t agree or disagree with his request.

“What are you asking my government?”

“Pardon?”

“What are you asking my employers, in exchange for me?”

Her smile is uncompromising. “They are not negotiating very much for you. That is why we have to undergo this messy business. We’d prefer not to, but you’ve killed so many people. Our people demand answers and swift justice, Mr. Torgo.”

“Hm, okay,” he says.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She finds that as she continues to get treated with kid gloves, the more frustrated she becomes. She has to shamelessly bother people that she’s in a fight with, namely Dany and Drogo, to solicit updates on Grey. Drogo is curt and cold to her, as he continually tells her that he knows about as much as she does. He mutters that he’s not high enough on the chain of command to get day-by-day updates on Grey. He impatiently and derisively suggests that she just go to her bestie and get all of the good gossip on Grey’s well-being from Daenerys. Afterward, it would be great if she came back and told the rest of them all how their teammate is doing because  _ he really doesn’t know. _

She  _ has  _ gone to Daenerys — first through emails that aren’t responded to. Then through text messages, with the awareness that she is way overstepping. Dany doesn’t answer those either. So, in disbelief, Missy starts to call Dany’s phone — and it goes to voicemail. Missandei leaves these messages anyway, even though she knows Dany doesn’t listen to her voicemail.

She learns that Lysa Arryn was deemed not a flight risk by whatever brokeass algorithm and judge’s poor judgement and that Lysa was released on 1.2 million bail, which she handily paid with money that the man she killed earned in his lifetime — what  _ the fuck. _

She learns this not because anyone deemed her worthy of being told, but because it  _ does _ become work gossip. Bronn is now kind of assigned to Lysa, and he is irritated enough for his lips to loosen. He breaches protocol and bitches about it under his breath during lunch. He tells them all that when he was in the Vale to suss out and talk with her protective detail as she awaits her next yet-to-be-assigned court date, he saw that she is back to living the high life. Country clubs. Unfrozen assets. Shopping sprees. 

Bronn crankily tells them that the lady is a fucking hoarder and there’s a shit ton of stupid rich people shit in her house, like solid gold decorative baby rattles and crystal candy dishes that she uses to hold cotton balls. It is fucking unreal. 

“I cannot fucking believe that this murdering bitch is sipping mai tais by the pool while Grey is imprisoned for a whole lot of  _ nothing,”  _ Yara gripes. 

“I can,” Kojja mutters. “Of course this happened like this.” She just about rolls her eyes at Yara — because Kojja is currently really worried about Grey and also really fucking sick of looking into the faces of rich white women — even if Yara is one of her best work friends. 

“Do you think she’s going to flip?” Robb asks Bronn, strategically changing the subject. He’s referring to Lysa and whether she will turn on Baelish — because they know that much now. 

“She’s a fucking nut job,” Bronn says. “So who even fucking knows?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


In between fielding Missandei’s annoying-as-shit questions all the time, Drogo also has to constantly check in with Grey’s parents, namely his mom, who is the point person for their family. He has to constantly check in because she constantly blows up his phone, wanting to know any morsel update on her son.

Drogo understands why they don’t notify the civilian family members of their officers now. He still believes that he did the right thing. It still wearily guts him a little bit, every time he talks to her to tell her that there are no new updates. 

She keeps telling him that he said it’d be five days and wanting answers for why five days have come and gone and he’s still not home yet. She keeps skirting on the edge of accusing Drogo of lying to her about her son.

He knows she is upset and really emotional and worried about Grey, so Drogo doesn’t correct her and tell her that he made no such claim. He just said that the last time he was fucking failed by the organization, it took five days to get him back. This time, it is different.

  
  
  
  


The current pro-West government leadership of Valyria is facing the threat of uprising from a number of vocal religious and militant anti-West sects. Dany closes out each day watching and reading copious amounts of Valyrian news and blogs. She knows the stories of the people that were killed — all of the immigrants had families that depend on the income. Now their situation is dire as they grieve the loss of their loved one. Their teary faces are constantly in the news, crying out for justice and blood. She knows that Alyn Valysar is a national hero, having risked his life in fighting against the flagrant arrogance of the West. She keeps seeing his fucking ugly face spouting off fucking nonsense and lies about how he almost lost his life trying to stop Grey’s alleged killing spree. She knows that prominent local leaders are watching this fiction and demanding that Grey be tried in their courts and then executed for his crimes.

Kevan Lannister has proved to be utterly fucking useless. All he ever does is tell her that he visited Grey, and Grey looks to be well. All he ever does is do the equivalent of looking at the bright side. His source of optimism is the fact that Grey is being held at a safehouse and is well guarded — instead of in the jail. 

Because in jail, he will  _ definitely  _ be killed. 

Kevan holds this up as proof that the Valyrian government is keen on working with them toward Grey’s release.

Dany now fucking understands why Kevan’s family exiled him to this figurehead post. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


The first thing he thinks of and the first thing he rules out is a hunger strike. 

He starts spending his long, idle, and awake hours trying to figure out how he’s going to kill himself and just end this fucking bullshit already. His life sucks anyway — it’s been sucking for years now. His parents have been practicing for this already, with the disownment of him. That was smart and clairvoyant of them. His brother will be pretty bummed, but he hasn’t seen his brother in over a year so maybe that has made it a teeny bit easier. Drogo will probably spin a yarn on his behalf and tell his folks that he died some heroic death protecting an entire nation of people. They will feel comforted by that as they eventually move on. 

He understands why his hands and feet are constantly bound now. He understands why he isn’t in a real prison now. He understands why he’s not allowed silverware and has to eat with his hands like an animal now. He understands why all of his food is mushy. He understands why everything in his fucking room is soft as shit now. He understands why he’s growing hairier by the day. He understands why he cannot even take a shit by himself. They anticipated this. They are accounting for this. They are fucking ensuring that he fucking stays awake for this fucking torture forever. This is hilariously the inverse of what he dealt with, with fucking Bolton. There, Bolton was trying to  _ end him. _ Life is a fucking laughably full of sad irony.

He is so disgusted with himself.

Presently, his best friend is the ambassador, who visits him on a weekly basis to deliver a rousing speech about how he needs to hang on because he’s being released  _ any day  _ now. Kevan Lannister is a terrible liar and Grey can read all of the things Kevan is refraining from telling him because Kevan is afraid.

His heart throbs in his chest as Kevan tells him something truthful. They are never afforded any privacy, so it’s in front of a guard that Kevan tells him that Daenerys has shut down relations between the Valyrian embassy in King’s Landing and the state. Kevan tiredly tells Grey he doesn’t think it was the right thing to do — it looks so spiteful — however, the fact of the matter is that the government is applying a massive amount of pressure toward trying to secure his release. He has to hang on.

After a careful and quiet moment, Grey just says, “Sure.” 

And then before Kevan leaves, he reaches up to touch his face — his chin. His bindings lightly rattle with the motion. He’s rubbing at his sparse beard. He says, “It’s itchy.” 

He also says, “I’m really bored, Kevan. Do you think you could convince them to let me have one book? I’ll read anything.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


After Kevan leaves Grey for the day, he immediately puts in a message over the secure line. He requests that Daenerys contact him right away. He needs to talk to her.

She is resentful and irritated when she finally does get on the phone with him. She tells him she had to walk out of a meeting because of his message — a roundabout way of letting him know how she presently feels about him.

He cuts her off to tell her, “He needs to be pulled out — now. Something is off. He was different today. You need to figure something out.  _ Right now.  _ Or something terrible is going to happen. _ ” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


Drogo sets her into a terrible mood for the rest of the day because he snaps at her when she swings by his office and lightly knocks on the door. 

All she says is, “Hey.”

And he’s pissed because she is an idiot and she doesn’t get that he doesn’t know jackshit about anything because his clearance isn’t high enough and he’s a cog in the machine — just like her dumb ass. He’s pissed that she doesn’t seem to understand that she is a constant reminder of what they have lost.

So he suddenly snaps and says, “Missandei — will you get it through your thick head? You were just _ fucking the guy _ on the sly. You are  _ not _ his family. You are _not_ entitled to any of this fucking information that you are asking for. Leave me alone for like,  _ a day,  _ okay?”

She flinches because his aggression is so palpable and so biting. She doesn’t flinch because he is right or she is scared of him. 

She casts a glance at the door, which is slightly ajar — and then she scans her eyes back to his face. 

She leaves his office and the main space is actually pretty sparse — it’s possible that no one overheard, not that it really matters much at this point. She’s not going to need to change departments because she  _ was _ in a relationship with a man who could be dead at any moment — if he’s not already because she hasn’t fucking heard  _ anything _ about him in nearly a month. She doesn’t cry over this. She just goes back to her desk and works in silence for the rest of the day.

She leaves work right at five o’clock. She goes straight home. Her dad offers her food but she’s not hungry. She just goes up to her bed and lies down in it. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


He tells her that spilling trade secrets is about the same as defecting. He tells her that if he talks, then he can never go back home. He asks her what the incentive is then — for giving up something so immense? Is the cost of such a thing his life? 

He’s about to tell her that he doesn’t care that much about his life — 

But she beats him to the punch. She tells him, “We cannot promise you wealth and comfort. Many people who defect find it deeply traumatizing, and they struggle for years with the decision. While we can offer your family relocation, it is up to them — whether they want to join you here. Otherwise — you will likely never see them again —”

“I’m not planning on seeing them ever again,” he cuts in. And in explanation, in response to her look, he says, “We’re estranged. Did your research turn up that tidbit? Did you know?”

She gives him just a ghost of a smile. She knows that he is being truthful, but he is masking the truth a little bit in order to try and save the people he loves. She says to him, “Why are you so loyal? That’s what I can’t figure out — why are you so loyal to them when they have done very little to earn your loyalty? Look what they have let happen to you — repeatedly.”

He knows that she’s not talking about his parents. 

“We gave them terms, you know,” she says. “They are fair terms. All they need to do is pay for these deaths. And admit fault.” She waves her palm absently over the table. “But they won’t even consider it.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Cersei has wanted to cut him loose for weeks now — because she sees this as an ongoing resource-heavy endeavor with no end in sight. Also, the fact that Daenerys is keen on getting him back makes Cersei disinclined toward the very same thing. 

Daenerys has pressed that he knows too much and is too valuable to be cut loose. Cersei has countered that by saying that protocol and procedure has been changed once before — which he was also the root cause of — it can be changed again. An expensive endeavor, but less costly than what Valyrians are asking for. 

“You threatened to remove their ambassador from his post,” Jon wearily says to Daenerys. “You can’t do that without consulting us, Dany.”

This is where they disagree. She has this working theory that Jon keeps dragging his feet whenever it comes to any sort of militancy because Grey is not one of his. She thinks that it’s easy for people just to do nothing as they watch the world burn. Because once the fire takes hold and grows, it’s just easier to say that the flame was always out of their control. People would rather be weak and complacent than be decisive and risk a mistake and risk losing face and status. 

This is what she tells herself to cope. 

She checks her phone really quickly as she leaves the office. Once she sees that she has no messages or calls from anyone important, she throws her phone into her purse and then dumps it in the passenger seat of her car.

She momentarily thinks about what it would feel like to just drive herself into the sea and just drown to death.

And then — 

She thinks better of that.

She starts digging in her messy purse for her phone again. Her hands shake from adrenaline as she quickly scrolls through her contacts, to the right now. She hits the call button.

“Varys.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


The guards watching over him are never armed, but he figures that they will figure out a way. 

His nurse is very nice. She’s a decade older than he is, and she feels sorry for him — because of the chains. She makes small talk with him whenever she comes back to take a look at the wound on his stomach. He has healed to the point where he does not need bandages anymore — but the crusty edges of his stitches are itchy and swollen and still under threat of infection. 

In High Valyrian, she tells him that he looks well-fed — which pleases her.

He obediently helps her by lifting up his shirt so she can get a good look at his wound. 

And then he lunges forward, grabs her by her forearm, yanks her, and sends her tumbling down to the floor in shock — enough for him to get her head and neck within reach of his hands and his chains.

He starts to cry as he cinches his bindings around her neck. As she starts to choke and grab at the chain around her purpling neck — he cinches her body around his legs and keeps her down — and she starts fighting for her life against him — and he cries out so much regret — and he tells her, “I’m  _ so sorry.” _

He looks into the face of the guard at the door — who is screaming at him to stop.

He cries because he’s a fucking terrible person, as he holds on and prays that it just  _ ends _ soon already.

He barely registers the pain — he gets hit really  _ hard _ — and the pain blooms and it repeats — his hands and his body goes slack as the light starts getting sucked out from his eyes and his brain. He thinks that this is it then.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She’s pouring herself a cup of coffee in the kitchen when her dad finally figures out why she’s been so fucking depressed and despondent for the last month. 

He barks her name from the den — with the kind of urgency that she hasn’t heard from him in years. She hears him shout,  _ “Missandei!” _

She thinks that maybe he has fallen or he is hurt. Her heart is pounding as she abandons her coffee on the counter and runs around the corner to his den. She says,  _ “Dad, _ are you  _ okay?” _

“Look,” he says, gesturing to the glowing TV.

Her hand reaches out to automatically hold onto the back of his lounger — to steady herself. She says, “Oh my God,” as she stares at Grey's face on glowing screen.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Cersei is so incensed that she didn’t even put makeup on or say goodbye to her sleeping children before she shoves her limbs into clothes, steps into a pair of shoes, and then dangerously speeds all the way to work early in the morning. Her hands clench and unclench around the steering wheel, as she imagines just choking the fucking life out of that fucking stupid whore.

Daenerys is already perfectly coiffed and sitting in a meeting with Cersei’s father and the others — because it’s  _ that bad  _ and it’s  _ this fucked up _ now. 

It’s ten minutes minutes before Dany’s flushed face escapes the reaming of a lifetime. 

Cersei grabs Dany by the elbow. Dany is disgusted by the touch and yanks her arm away with a sneer. 

Cersei gets her face in close to Dany. She hisses, “You just committed  _ career suicide.  _ You fucking  _ stupid bitch.” _

“I know,” Dany says plainly, as she brushes a hand down her cream blouse. “Now help me secure the money for the death payments so we can get him out by the end of the month.”     

  
  
  
  
  


 


	44. Dany's last ditch effort

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dany's career takes a nose-dive so that Grey can live! It's going to be kind of hard for him to stay mad at her after this, but we'll see! Missy continues to be a real sad sack without the future love of her life. Tyrion's dad hates him, but that's not new. What is new is that he also hates Cersei! Cersei counts blood money.

  
  
  
  


 

He wakes again with his head pounding and his bladder screaming and his eyes unseeing — and in disappointment, he realizes that he isn’t dead. He fucked up. He feels his heart beating in his chest — he is lying down on his side. He is damp — and when he tries to move, he finds that his entire body is aching and sore — throbbing. He tastes stale salt and metal in his dry mouth. He does a quick assessment. His gums must’ve been bleeding — he still has all his teeth — his lips are dry and feel swollen — his face hurts — his nose is probably broken and his stomach is burning — and maybe bleeding. Maybe because the guards ripped apart his stitches while they were kicking in his guts.

He finds that he can’t move much anymore, because of his injuries but also because his bindings are even more restrictive. He finds he can’t roll over onto his stomach because he is chained to a wall. He can make out oblong shapes in the darkness, so his sight is not completely impaired. He might’ve just been put in a dark room that is barren and full of storage boxes.

He can’t reach his hands up to his head. He tries to pivot his head toward the ground — experimentally — but then he learns that his neck is chained up, too.

He really needs to pee.

This is definitely worse than before.

  
  
  
  


Tyrion has to pull in every fucking single resource he has ever had at his disposal — he has to call in so many fucking favors — he has to make so many terrible underhanded threats based on the secrets he has accumulated about people over the years — in order to keep the press behaving. He has to talk to the station owners, the businessmen the few businesswomen who own the conglomerates, and it feels like he has to wrestle this fucking beast to the ground so that it will submit for _three_ seconds before it leaps up and threatens to bite his face off again. 

The official story is that Grey is an embassy employee, in Valyria on a contract as a technical advisor. He was caught up in Valyria’s anti-West propaganda simply by being foreign-looking — aka Black — and now he is unlawfully detained for crimes that he did not commit by a bunch of fucking anti-West racists.

Tyrion has been working overtime keeping Grey’s real job out of the press. There are a few fringe publications not playing ball and trying to leak that Grey is a government spy, which isn’t at all true _and_ it carries across the wrong image. Thus, Tyrion and the lawyers are the midst of threatening to ruin these soft-body assholes’ entire fucking lives if they don’t take down their stupid erroneous bullshit. These fucking bloggers who live in their parents’ fucking basements don’t even realize that the wrong shit they run have conseqences and fucking affects security on a national level.  

“Meera!” Tyrion barks into the microphone — in his car because he’s driving erratically and she’s on speakerphone. “Can you find a fucking cuter picture of him? Something less homicidal-looking, please? Fuck.”

“I pulled them from his file,” Meera’s disembodied voice says out of the speakers. “We only have the few photos he took for his key card.”

“Go on his fucking Facebook — _why_ am I better at your fucking job than you are?”

“This actually isn’t my job,” she returns, kind of petulantly. “He doesn’t _have_ a Facebook account.”

“Yeah he does, idiot. He has a fake one. There are lots of pictures of him looking non-threatening on it. Look that account up, _idiot.”_

He hangs up on her. Because fuck her, she’s so annoying sometimes.

  
  
  
  


They don’t really get that he can’t pee into a bucket with his hands chained up — and they don’t really care. He gets one miserable bathroom break a day. They unchain him from the wall. They hold up him to his feet. They pull down his pants. There is a bucket. They generally humiliate him — he doesn’t give a fuck because he just wants to die already — and he just makes a fucking mess as they laugh at him and say a bunch of predictable things about how they all understand why he wanted to kill himself, because what man would want to keep on living, pathetic and cockless? 

And then he is pushed back down, chained up, and left alone again. Sometimes there is food and water delivery, which he doesn’t eat or drink from — until they force-feed him. 

He finds that the water tastes wrong and his teeth and gums hurt — and his breath is rancid from days of not brushing his teeth and the blood in his mouth from the cuts. 

Sometimes he feels such pervasive despair — just beyond tears — as he tries to just go back to sleep. He is tired of living like this. He feels a lot of regret for everything bad he has done. He really, really hopes his parents are okay. He knows that it is his fault if they are already dead.

  
  
  
  


Now that news of Grey’s imprisonment by the Valyrian government has hit their own news channels, information that was previously classified is now public knowledge. 

Missy finds it utterly eerie and grotesque, to be silently standing in line at the grocery store and seeing a tiny photo of his face as a teaser for the world news section on local news stands. She finds it really shitty to accidentally overhear random comments from random strangers who don’t even know him. 

She overhears a young woman talking about celebrity news with her friend before flippantly seeing his photo and mistaking him for a celebrity, asking her friend if he’s that guy in that one horse racing movie. Her friend corrects her and says he’s not an actor — he’s just a nobody.

Her dad has pieced together everything — not that it’s very hard to, seeing as how Dany basically gave him a roadmap. Now, her dad knows why she’s been so emotionally shut down over the last couple of months. Her dad has terrible timing and has been trying to relate to her to get her to begin feeling again. He’s been telling her stories about his own closeness with his ex-partners — revisiting bits and pieces of her mom’s death. He keeps trying to come up with new ways to impart lessons about loss and grief onto her. 

She can’t stand to ever be unkind to her dad, so she just despondently sits around having dinner with him, stopping herself from screaming that he actually doesn’t know what she’s going through at all because he got to have _decades_ with her mom. She is a person who lost her mother too early. And she is a person who lost her love before she even had any time with him. Her dad may deeply understand grief, but their situations are fundamentally different.

From personal experience — because the Greyjoy family has some notoriety — Yara has told Missy that the news will be really hot for a couple of weeks before the public gets fatigued and moves on. Yara tells Missy that Dany has probably about ten days to make some moves, to keep public interest on him high. 

Yara gets these high security leaks because of her proximity to her dad. Yara has whispered to Missandei that the top leadership is just going rabid over what Dany has done — leaking classified information out to the press the way she did. They’re scrambling to close this chapter as swiftly as possible. 

“Do you . . . want some more tea?” her dad asks gently, lifting up the teapot.

She tiredly shakes her head no. She says, “I’m fine, Dad.”

She thinks a lot about the moment she betrayed him — and that’s how she’s been qualifying it to herself. She gave him up. She treated him like he was untrustworthy and like his mental health was compromised — right when it was convenient for her to. He did not deserve that. She did not deserve him. And now he is suffering because of the mistakes and flaws of everyone else. It is unfair.

  
  
  
  


Drogo doesn’t need to tell Grey’s parents to turn their non-existent TV to the news channel. They actually find out so quickly where their son is held because their community is really close-knit. Their phones start ringing the moment people start recognizing Grey’s face while watching the news. 

After that, TVs all over their Ebonhead community get turned to the Western news stations, waiting for any updates about Grey. Reporters explain that Grey was a contracted embassy employee who was wrongfully detained and charged with murders he did not commit while in Valyrian. The Valyrians are not adhering to conventions laid out to ensure peaceful diplomatic relations worldwide. Reporters also explain that Valyrian law allows for capital punishment. If found guilty, Grey will be executed for his crimes. 

Food has been dropped on their doorsteps. Candles get lit for him. Prayers are said for him and for his folks. His folks know this because people often spontaneously cry all over them when they are seen out in public and are recognized. Work has been hard for them. Their son’s situation has becomes this unavoidable thing that does not even allow them to properly grieve because they are too busy consoling other people. 

  
  
  
  


She wears her hair in its natural wave today, instead of taking a hot iron and straightening it. She hasn’t got time for much these days, because her entire waking hours have been spent trying to get him back. She hasn’t found the proper time to break it off with Daario, for instance, but she supposes that the utterly shitty way in which she’s been treating him has given him the message quite clearly. There’s been a pile of cardboard containers piling up at her front door because her cleaning lady doesn’t get the hint — take it the fuck out and get rid of it — and Dany has been too busy to teach Rosie how to do her job better.  

Dany sits with her legs crossed underneath the table, wearing a cream blouse and a tight leather pencil skirt. This is the outfit she has chosen to wear when speaking to press later in the day. It’s feminine, professional, distant, and with a slight edge. 

“I don’t understand why you did this,” Olenna bluntly says in their all-hands meeting. “Why do something so drastic?”

Everyone wants answers from her and nothing Dany says is satisfying enough. Dany suspects it’s because they would all like for her to say something like: I did this because I have lost my ever-loving fucking mind.

“He’s one of our best assets,” Dany responds mildly. “He’s been very loyal. Why wouldn’t we want him back?”

“We were already in the process of getting him out though, Daenerys,” Jon interjects.

“It wasn’t working,” Dany says.

“Escalating this wasn’t your call to make,” Olenna says, refraining from sighing. 

Olenna feels frustrated. Olenna currently feels like the world has gotten a lot smaller. She also has this sense that her legacy is diminishing right before her very eyes. She thought that she was too old to feel surprised like this or disappointed like this.

Olenna has mentored and championed Dany from the very moment that Dany entered the organization. In Dany, Olenna had seen so much raw talent, such a tireless and relentless work ethic, and a passion to do good in the world. In Dany, Olenna had seen the future of the organization that Olenna has sacrificed her marriage and children to, in order to blaze trails — she saw a progressive organization that was capably run by a woman.  

That dream is over now. She doesn’t understand why. It seems entirely wasteful.

“He was the lead on a team that suffered three deaths and the maiming of my son,” Balon Greyjoy says coldly. “How was this man even cleared to go into the field again?”

“He was signed off by psych,” Jon says, turning to face Balon. “He has nothing but glowing reviews. No one has a bad thing to say about him.”

“He was involved in two of the biggest clusterfucks this organization has seen in the last five years!” Balon suddenly shouts. “But yes! As long as his coworkers like him! Who the fuck _cares!”_  

  
  
  
  


Tywin cannot remove her completely from her post just yet, because so many people are used to her face that it would be too telling if she were suddenly removed right when this upheaval began. It would look like her actions weren’t sanctioned by leadership — which they weren’t. It would look like the organization is chaotic and disorganized — which it sometimes is. It would look like mismanagement.  

So he just internally strips her of her clearance instead and makes her into a purely a figurehead. He says nothing to her about it — because he’s an obscene dick and he doesn’t think she’s worth giving explanation to.

Dany finds that she can no longer log into the system anymore. When she asks Jojen about it, his silence tells her all she needs to know.

Her work is something she cares _immensely_ about, and it has turned really bad for her. She hasn’t quite fully processed what she has done to her life because she’s been really busy trying to get Grey out of the claws of a bunch of white supremacists, but her preoccupation with doing this _one last thing_ before she is put out to pasture and shot in the head does not stop others from commenting on her life.

Olenna, for instance, grabs Dany’s arm in a really firm grip for a lady as old as Olenna is — and forces Dany to stoop down a little bit in her heels so that Olenna can whisper into her ear.

Olenna is saying, “Why are you doing this? Are you sleeping with him? _No man_ is worth what you are doing to your career and what you have worked _so hard_ for.”

This gives Dany such flashbacks to all of these tired old lessons she’s received over the years, of the ‘don’t shit where you eat’ variety. Lessons about how the world is much harder on women than on men for these kinds of things. Never sleep with a subordinate. There will be periods of loneliness, but that is the price of power. Blah blah blah. 

She doesn’t dignify this very personal and very insulting question with an answer. She just repeats the truth — which no one buys from her. She just says, “It’s the right thing to do.”

  
  
  
  


“Oh my God, this is taxpayer money,” Cersei mutters, clawing her hand up her short bangs, pushing them askew off her face.

“Not all of it,” Tyrion says reasonably, twirling his glass of wine in his hand, his mouth already stained red, his body already swaying in his office chair. “Some of it is Lannister money. Which is funny, isn’t it? Paying blood money with blood money?”

“Shut up,” Cersei mutters, flipping through pages and pages of a document that she has already read through fifty times over already.

Their dad currently hates and is furious at two out of his three children because two of his children are doing what is completely the only logical thing that they must do given the situation that they are in — and this pisses off their dad because their dad really likes it when stuff is out of his control. 

Their dad’s shit attitude is about normal actually. He usually likes being pissed at and disappointed in his children. Tyrion just usually bears the brunt of it alone. Tyrion really just hates having stuff in common with Cersei. 

“This must be everything you ever wanted,” Tyrion says to his sister mildly. “Daenerys will no longer be in your way _to the top.”_

“Yes,” Cersei mutters, not looking up from the pages in front of her. “Because Daenerys is definitely the only reason our father sees me as barely more than a cow who is only good for making babies.”

The paperwork details the amounts — the costs of lives even though they are still not admitting responsibility for the deaths — as is Valyrian custom, which heavily favors money exchange to make all momentous life occasions feel transactional. The foreign nationals, dead, actually cost less than the Valyrian cop’s pain and suffering.

“I don’t feel sorry for you,” Tyrion says into his wine, changing the quality of his voice, fogging up the glass.

  
  
  
  


He thinks he’s delirious and hallucinating, when a sheet of bright light hits his retinas and burns them. As hands roughly rustle his chains, he groggily blinks against the bright light and asks them what is going on. 

“You’re going to court, Mr. Torgo.”

“What? For trial?”

She doesn’t answer. 

They just make quick work of him. They hold him down as they carefully shave his face and his head. He doesn’t understand what the fuck is happening, so he tries to fight them off — but days and days of atrophy and malnutrition and his festuring injuries have affected his body. He is weak. So it is easy to subdue him. He breathes hard against the strong hands as they release him from metal and then strip him naked and pull him out into the yard in the back. 

He looks down at himself — it does not look great — and then he shuts his eyes and curls his body in surprise as shockingly cold water hits him. They are spraying him down with a hose. 

He’s shivering, in spite of the hot weather, still wet as they yank him back inside and then dress him in cheap, nondescript men’s clothing that is a touch too tight because they guessed his size wrong. 

Then they shove him into an SUV.

  
  
  
  


Before leaving for her flight, she sips from her hot little thermos of coffee as she flips news channels with her remote, as she watches a Valyrian male conservative stand in front of an impassioned crowd, crying out for justice and the expulsion of the West from Valyria. She watches as this impossibly young man talks about bringing the Valyrian empire back to the glory days — the good ol’ days of owning people and other nations — and she changes the channel because she hates listening to idiots on her personal time. She gets enough of that at work.

At home, Grey has become a little bit of an icon. She knows he would hate this if he knew what she has done to get him back. But he has become a bit of a symbol against the rising tide of anti-immigration and anti-Blackness. What has happened to him has become fodder for a lot of politicized commentary from politicians, activists, and other talking heads. This is why it is now impossible for the organization to leave him in Valyria. This has the public’s eyes on it now. Doing so would mean that the government is okay with sacrificing another Black male body for its own interests.

She knows that Grey would really hate that she used his identity like this — even if it was to save him. But she will gladly deal with his self-righteous anger over this later.

She leaves for the airport an extra hour early, because she has a lot more free time these days. 

  
  
  
  


In the SUV, he recognizes his interviewer. She actually is sitting one row in front of him, turned around to face him. Her light eyes take in how he currently looks — the bruising, the cuts, and the discoloration on his face.

She says, “You don’t look good, Mr. Torgo. That’s unfortunate.”

“Is the nurse okay?”

She scrunches up her nose delicately. “Who?”

Grey feels his face aching as he tenses it up. “The woman I strangled.”

“Oh,” she says softly, her eyes turning a little more sympathetic now. “Yes, she is traumatized, but she will be perfectly fine. We gave her a nice severance package.”

“You fired her?”

“She quit,” his interviewer says. “Is it not called that where you are from? Severance?”

“We don’t usually give severance to people who quit,” he says.

“That’s barbaric,” she says casually.

Then, after taking in a fortifying breath, he finally asks what he’s been wanting to ask. He asks, “Are my parents okay?”

“Your parents?” She scrunches up her nose again. “I don’t know. I think so? Why do you ask?” And then she shuts her eyes and then suddenly laughs — like she just got the joke. 

Except he isn’t joking at all.

He waits for her to finish laughing by holding his breath.

“Yes, Mr. Torgo. Yes. They are fine. We didn’t have to do any of the messy business. Your government finally came through. Better late than never, right?” 

  
  
  
  


He expects to be taken to the courts where he’d speak in front of a judge — because that was where she told him they’d be going. 

However, she evidently lied because they end up driving an hour to an airfield — to a smaller airport of mostly domestic flights and a few short-distance international flights.

He looks at her — after looking up at an airplane — in confusion.

Over the loud whirring noise of the plane’s engine, she touches the top of her head and then says, “Goodbye, Mr. Torgo.”

  
  
  
  


She arrives in Volantis before Grey does — about two hours before he is due there. Bronn leaves her to wander the terminal by herself as he goes off to find an open area for a smoke break. Before he leaves, he continues grumbling that it’s dumb that they just spent ten hours on a plane only to wait for Grey to arrive on a flight that takes less than two hours from Valyria. 

He mutters, “Who fucking _planned_ this?” as he shoves an unlit cigarette in between his teeth and starts walking off in a random direction.

She walks around a little bit, looking at gift shop items and food stands, trying to anticipate his needs. He might be hungry when he lands. He might be tired. He might want a pillow for the long flight home. He might want a magazine to read. She wonders what he would want to eat, if he has actually come to miss Westerosi food — or if he’s still staunch in his aversion to it. 

She’s anxious. She is very anxious to see him again.

She thinks about trivial things in order to avoid thinking about how long he’s been held against his will and whether he was well treated or mistreated. Kevan has been unable to see Grey in the last two weeks — completely blocked by the Valyrian government.

A part of her is catastrophic and deeply pessimistic. There were assurances but no proof of his aliveness. A part of her is sure that she is about to see a casket of his body, in pieces, and this is what the fucking Valyrians are returning to her. This is what she will have to explain to Missandei and his parents. She will have to tell Missandei that she let Grey die. She will have to tell his parents that she failed their son — over and over again — until he just died. 

A terrible part of her thinks that all that she has sacrificed for him would be for nothing — if he is already dead.

She thinks that even in his death, she is selfish. She is self-centered because she is always thinking about herself — like, she is thinking about how his death would affect her life.

The two hours just _drag._ Once Bronn gets back from his smoke break, he is not any more chatty. He is also quiet and tense. 

They sit side-by-side silently at the gate that Grey is supposed to arrive in.

  
  
  
  


He has his entire flight to come to terms with the possibility that he is maybe going home. He is kind of overwhelmed when the plane gets into the air, because it’s leaving Valyria and he’s thinking that this would be very extreme of them, to give him such hope before they just pulled him back down, said just kidding, and continued to torture him.

He has no possessions at the moment. Just a napkin and a bag of nuts in his hand that he had gotten from the flight attendant who studiously did not comment on his face. He has already looked around for things to kill himself with — if he had to — and he has decided that he can wait on this. He needs to wait and see. He was shortsighted and panicked and rash before.

The flight is short, but it feels long. Of all the things he can think about getting back once he’s home — the thing that he thinks the most about is being able to pee and poop with privacy again. He just thinks about having privacy again and how special and odd it’s going to feel — to be able to go places of his own free will again.

It feels weird when the cabin chimes and the captain announces, in Valyrian, that they are about to make their descent into Volantis.

It feels weird when it actually happens — the slow descent that’s spread out over half an hour.

It feels weird when the plane shuttles to its gate — and then stops — and then people get out of their seats to collect their items. He has no items — so he just waits.

It feels weird to just be allowed to walk off the plane. He walks with a limp — his foot is a little fucked — but he can’t believe that no one is stopping him from doing this.

  
  
  
  


They stand up right away when the doors open and passengers start to disembark, siphoning out.

She’s about to worry that maybe this was all a big mistake and Grey isn’t on the plane at all — the Valyrians fucked her — when he just appears. He just _appears._

Bronn is quick to respond — quicker than she is. Bronn says, “Torgo! Oh my fucking God! Thank God!” as he runs up to Grey, as he clasps Grey’s hand and carefully touches Grey’s shoulder. 

Grey is dazed — and trying not to flinch in pain.

She walks up to them, teetering a little in her heels. She winces when she sees him up close. She frowns. _Fuck_ the Valyrians. She says, “Your face.”

“I know,” Grey mutters, looking far off into the terminal. “It’s too beautiful to look at.”

Bronn laughs gratefully. He’s really glad to hear some sort of joke from Grey. “We’re so glad to see it!” he says earnestly.  

Dany tries to joke around, too. But she’s a little bad at jokes. She doesn’t sound smooth at all, as she says, “Missandei’s going to be in for a quite a shock, when she sees this face in this state.” 

Besides just a slight and brief smile of politeness — Grey largely ignores that statement. 

Instead, he leans forward a little bit. And he softly says, “How did you do this, Dany? What did it cost?”

“It’s not important,” she says — as she blinks back some tears. “It’s just really good to have you back.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	45. Grey is home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dany and Grey have deep convos on a plane. Bronn sleeps. Drogo cleans. Yara yells. Grey's parents worry. Missandei waits for the future/current love of her life.

  
  
  
  


 

Grey doesn’t sleep on the long plane ride back to King’s Landing. She is sitting between him and Bronn, who started snoring before the plane even left the tarmac. 

Even though she is exhausted, she doesn’t let herself sleep either. It just doesn’t feel right. He turned off the screen in front of him — and she did the same — so there isn’t even a movie playing in front of them as distraction. 

So for hours, they sit largely in silence, side-by-side, staring blankly ahead. They can’t talk about work because they are on a passenger plane, so it is not secure to talk about work.

He smells kind of musty and odd — he smells a little bit bad like body odor and meat — but mostly he has this disconcerting scent on him. 

“You must be looking forward to a hot shower and being in your own clothes again,” she finally says — the first thing she’s said in hours.

“Sorry,” he mutters, as he incrementally shifts away from her, toward the aisle. He apparently knows that he looks and smells like a wreck. He appears contrite about it — maybe even embarrassed over being in this state in her presence.

She feels just fucking  _ awful  _ over it _. _ She mentally lambastes herself for being so rude and careless — and for being a shitty person who is so terrible at apologies and at acknowledging even slight wrong-doing — which is precisely why they haven’t talked face-to-face in over a year. She finds that she cannot even express any sort of regret over all of the fucking terrible things that have happened to him — even though saying sorry is the very fucking least she can do.

She just doesn’t think he needs to be put in the position of having to be gracious in the face of her apology. She just thinks that some things are so immense that apologizing for them is like a slap in his face. Apologies are self-serving and only absolve her own guilt. She doesn’t deserve any leniency at all. She knows she is a shitty person. 

“Everyone has been missing you at home,” she tells him quietly.

“Have they?” he responds, his voice slightly muffled by the heel of his hand.

“They’ll be so glad to see you.”

“Great,” he mumbles.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He feels really . . . stressed out, actually. Being contained on a plane among so many people is stressing him out. It’s not the confinement of it — he is fine with that. It’s the amount of people that is making him feel a little distressed. 

He tries to talk himself out of anxiety. He tells himself no one is a threat — that these are just normal people carrying on their normal lives. He tells himself that he’s ready to die — he’s been ready — so if it happens, that’s okay, too. He tells himself that Bronn is here — and Bronn’s purpose is really to ensure that Grey and Dany don’t randomly get shot in the face. 

He realizes that Bronn is fucking sleeping without a care in the world — because Bronn hasn’t been imprisoned and threatened and then beaten for two months. Grey understands that it’s going to take a little bit of time for his brain to relax and pull itself out of survival mode. He understands that his body has conditioned itself to produce excess adrenaline and his hormones have been out of whack for a while now. He understands that some of what he is panicking about is completely out of his control — and that he is actually fine and safe now. 

He requested the aisle seat because he wanted easy access to the toilets. It was a spur of the moment decision that seems stupid in hindsight. Every bit of human noise and every accidental brush as people walk by him stresses him out. 

He realizes that it was sort of a mixed blessing, that his time with Ramsay Bolton was comparatively short. He realizes it was a good thing, that he was unconscious for a while after he and Theon were found and retrieved. It had afforded his body time to heal and to get back to its equilibrium. 

He is finding that there are so many things about this time that feels different from last time.

“Are you hungry? Thirsty?” Dany has noticed that he barely touched his meals. “We can order something if you’d like.”

“I’m fine.”

His jaw hurts — that’s why. And he doesn’t feel like telling her that the thought of extremely cold or extremely hot beverages make him want to scream. He doesn’t want to tell her that the only thing he can probably stand eating is mash — so baby food. He also does not want to use the plane’s toilets. He just wants access to them, but he wants to put off dealing with his body until he is alone. The last time this happened, he was fortunate enough not to have to deal with this. Because he was unconscious so a nurse probably cleaned him while he was out cold. He didn’t realize he had been bestowed so many small gifts the last time he was mutilated and deeply traumatized. He didn’t appreciate it enough. 

“Alright,” she says lightly. “Well, let me know if anything changes.”

“Sure.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She is not special, so Missy learns that Grey is  _ fucking okay  _ and is  _ coming back  _ like how the people in HR and payroll find out that he’s coming back: through office gossip. 

Yara casually throws it out there — agitatedly. Yara actually just freaks out on Brienne really unfairly because Brienne accidentally left a dirty coffee cup on Grey’s desk. Yara learned through her dad that Grey has been secured and rather than responding in elation like a normal person, she started rampaging through the building, snapping at people in the course of ensuring that they properly prepare things for Grey’s homecoming.

Yara gets as far as, “What the fuck, Brienne! Do you think Grey’s desk is a fucking dump for  _ your garbage!” _

Brienne’s is shell-shocked, and her face is like — hurt and confused.

Robb immediately cuts in and says to Yara, “Hey, she obviously didn’t mean any offense by it —”

“I _ didn’t,” _ Brienne says quickly, removing the offensive coffee cup with a burning red face.

At this point, Yara realizes how much of a  _ fucking asshole _ she is being, so she frowns and crosses her arms over her chest defensively, as her voice completely conveys the opposite of her posture. She says, “Brie, I’m real fucking sorry for freaking out like that —”

Brienne explains, “I forgot I left it there —”

“I totally get that —”

“I didn’t mean to just disrespect his space like that —”

“You didn’t,” Yara says quickly. “I just went full-on mega bitch ‘cause I want his desk to look normal when he sees it again. I don’t want him to think that we’ve been like — oh, Grey’s been in prison? Fuck his shit.”

“Wait, what?” Robb asks, furrowing his brows as other people in the office overhear this conversation and start drifting closer. “It’s official? Grey’s been released?”

Yara looks dazed — like she actually forgot, in her agitation, that other people don’t know this information. “Oh shit, yeah. He’s flying home right now. Bronn and Dany have him.”

_ “What?”  _ Daario says. “Fucking serious?”

“Oh my God,” Yara says. “Didn’t Drogo tell you guys?”

“Drogo’s not at  _ fucking work _ today,” Sandor gripes, pushing himself off of his desk, grinding his teeth as he glares at Yara for withholding this information for so long.

“How the fuck am I supposed to know that?” Yara asks. “Selmy should’ve told you guys, then.”

“He’s been in high-level meetings all week,” Gendry says reasonably.

“Guys!” Yara snaps. “Again — I don’t know what to tell you! I don’t fucking follow Drogo’s and Selmy’s schedules that closely!”

At this point — in the midst of all of the excited shouting — Pia, who has been listening from the edge of the room, bursts into tears. 

The sound and look of it is so bizarre that all eyes simultaneously swing to Pia’s hand — which is covering her own face in embarrassment — and Missy catches a few looks also shot her way, too — mostly from Kojja and Alayaya, of the ‘can you believe this bitch right now?’ variety. 

In contrast, Missy is not crying. She is just in the midst of still processing. She remembers the last time this happened, how she cried sitting next to him at his bedside in the hospital — even though she barely knew him. In this way, she relates to Pia. Sometimes, people cry over people they don’t know that well. Sometimes, people can’t cry over the people they know intimately well. 

“I didn’t realize you and Grey were so close,” Alayaya says slowly and skeptically, as she reaches out to tepidly pat Pia on the shoulder.

“We’re not,” Pia mutters, wiping her eyes and taking a tissue from Gendry. “It’s just so sad — what happened to him. I’m glad he’s okay.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


So she texts her dad and brothers on family group chat and tells them that she has to miss family dinner at Mars’ house today — because of a work thing. While her dad has always been unfailingly supportive even as he disapproved of her personal and professional choices sometimes — her brothers have always been lippy. 

Ever since they learned about Grey though, they have been really really nice to her — overly nice. They have treated her with kid gloves. 

So her cancellation on them largely goes without any sassing or comment. They just basically say okay and tell her to be safe. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Drogo has been MIA at work because he took time off to ensure that Grey’s folks are among the first people to see their kid again. 

His parents and brother fly right away to King’s Landing after Drogo’s call. Drogo spends the morning cleaning Grey’s pretty spotless apartment and hiding away some potential triggers — like the insanely fat stack of mail that Meera has been compiling on the dining table _ what the fuck. _ Drogo breaks the law and rifles through the pile and starts throwing away and shredding all of the bullshit advertisements and credit card pre-approval mailers. He also rips open a few envelopes that look like bills only to find that they are actually bills — and after a few semi-stressful minutes, Drogo figures out that Meera left these bills behind because Grey already set auto-pay on all of them. 

Drogo turns on the faucet so that it doesn’t gurgle or hiccup due to months of non-use. He checks the burners on Grey’s stove and also Grey’s TV and internet. As he does all of this, he wryly observes to himself that he is so fucking nervous and freaked out over something that he’s been fucking praying for. He observes to himself that the last time this happened, he showed his devotion by reading pornography out loud to Grey’s unconscious body. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Drogo picks up Grey’s parents and brother from the airport and they completely do not want to do anything besides see Grey right away — they don’t want to eat or rest or stop by Grey’s place to drop off their luggage. Grey’s dad — who vacillates between being incredibly warm and friendly and being incredibly angry and moody — is moody today. He just shoves his family’s stuff into Drogo’s trunk, ignoring Drogo’s and Azzie’s helpfulness. Then he expectantly waits to be driven to campus.

Drogo takes them there. He gets them visitor passes. He explains to them that they cannot wander before he escorts them to the visitor’s area. 

They end up waiting there for nearly eight hours.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Once Grey lands, there is so much policy and procedure that he has to endure — to ensure that potential security breaches that occurred in the time that he’s been away are all logged and assessed. He notes that they are back to using euphemism. He was away rather than incarcerated — like he took a sabbatical or something. The way he gets talked about is not surprising.

He gets put in a room with Tywin Lannister, Renly Baratheon, and Olenna Tyrell right away. He kind of stutters right before he realizes who he’s about to talk to — he tells Bronn and Dany that he looks too fucking awful.

“Can I shower or change first, before seeing them?”

_ “No,”  _ Dany says mutinously. And then, fearing that she has given him the wrong impression, her voice softens — as do her eyes. She looks over his face. She says, “They need to  _ see _ what has been done to you.”

He sighs. He doesn’t really want to continue to be a tool in Dany’s arsenal — weaponized in her constant battle against upper leadership — but he supposes that he doesn’t have a choice in this at the moment.

He follows her into the room.

  
  
  
  
  
  


The look of him grosses out upper leadership — probably — but they all say nice things to him about his bravery and his commitment. They give him a lot of assurances about his place in the organization. They all tell him they are so glad he is back and safe. 

It’s a lot like how it was last time — before they forced him to take an entire year off from work to recuperate his brain — so he doesn’t trust what they are saying to him at all.

He’s severely sleep deprived, is in deep need of a doctor, and hasn’t eaten in nearly a day — but he spends  _ hours _ in there with them, detailing every single thing that has happened to him since he was detained by the Valyrians.

He breaks down what has happened to him — without breaking down. He doesn’t crumple or lose it in front of them — which may be going against Dany’s wishes. But he is so beyond performing in front of them to prove his worthiness. He is just fucking tired. He just wants this to be over so he can go clean himself and then go lie down on something soft. 

“Son,” Tywin Lannister steadily says to him toward the end of their meeting. “We really appreciate everything you have done for the organization.”

Grey is pretty sure that Tywin is annoyed that he didn’t just die in Valyria. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


He thinks he’s about to see a doctor — so it makes sense that he gets stripped naked again by a male nurse he does not know in a room with medical equipment. He’s never been in here before.

And he manages to be surprised when — before a doctor even appears — photos of his face and his torso get taken on a phone. He actually looks for Dany to help him — before he remembers that she is outside the door, because she’s not allowed in — for the sake of his  _ privacy. _

He is confused by the pictures — and getting angry because he is so tired and because this is bullshit — so he asks why.

He is told that it’s because they need to keep evidence of the brutality of the Valyrians. He is reminded that it’s standard protocol — and he realizes that this probably happened after Bolton, too — but he was just  _ too unconscious _ to consent to the documentation of his injuries. 

And then he realizes that his consent probably does not even matter. He signed it away at some point during the beginning phase of his employment here — probably.

He’s too tired and delirious from the lack of sleep to question it further. He just lets hands pull off his clothes, and he tries to hold himself upright as the photos get snapped.

  
  
  
  
  
  


A doctor sees him soon after that. After a relatively brief hour, the doctor tells the medical assistant of the various procedures that need to be scheduled for him. They don’t think he has any broken ribs — but he complains that it’s hard to breathe a little bit — so he has to get x-rays taken of his chest.

He needs to see a dentist. His gums are inflamed. His foot is not broken or fractured, probably just sprained. He is anemic. He is dehydrated. He has lost a lot of weight. He needs to be on another course of antibiotics because his wound was re-opened. 

They collect a urine sample from him. He makes a bit of a mess and has to wash his hands — and his pee is a crazy dark, brownish yellow. He leaves it for the medical assistant.

And then the doctor tells him that he’s going to be fine. 

He is like, “What?” because a part of him expected to be told that something is terribly wrong. He’s going to die soon.

Dr. Martell cheerfully tells him, “You’re a healthy young man. You’ll heal fast.”

Grey says, “Okay?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


The wound of his stomach gets re-stitched up by a nurse.

The contents of an IV bag gets pumped into his veins because he is so dehydrated. 

He is reluctant to ask for more pain medicine because it feels wrong to, for some reason. 

He’s bleeding a little bit again when he is wheeled out of the examination room. He tried to walk, but they told him to just  _ relax _ and take it  _ easy. _

He’s about to really complain to Dany. In irritation, he is saying, “I was just told I’m not allowed to walk —”  

And then he sees Drogo’s anxious face — which softens when Drogo sees how just  _ fucked up _ Grey looks. 

“Hey, bud —”

“He’s here to take you home,” Dany explains wryly, the corner of her mouth twitching into a really small smile. “So you can finally get that shower you have very much earned today. He also has a surprise for you.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


The surprise is his fucking parents and brother — who thought they were being punked real good by Drogo — after being left to wait for eight hours in the waiting area of an office building.

Had Drogo asked Grey what he wanted, he would’ve told Drogo that he wants to wait a little bit before seeing his family because this is a really overwhelming situation, and he looks really crazy. The first time he was returned to them all maimed and fucked up, he had more than an entire month of healing before he had to face them. He had an entire month to ready himself.

He also would’ve wanted to wait and delay this, in order to emotionally prepare for this a little bit.

But as it is — he doesn’t expect to see them at all — especially not after how scared he was for them during his detainment. Especially not after how they left things the last time they were together.

He just doesn’t expect to see evidence of their aliveness and their cohesiveness so immediately after returning.

He says, “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad —”

He’s about to say hello to his brother, too — but his mom cuts him off by just full-on sobbing over the sight of him, almost falling to the floor if it weren’t for his dad catching her by the arms. His dad is crying, too. His brother is crying, too. 

Grey is fucking emotional about this, too. He knows he looks fucking terrible.

Around his swollen cheeks, he says, “Mom, I’m totally fine.”

It sounds utterly ridiculous to all of them. So he shuts his eyes in regret.

  
  
  
  
  
  


His parents yell-ask Dany and Drogo a lot of questions about why and how the hell he looks the way he does. They actually don’t ask him even though he is the most qualified to answer their questions. Maybe they don’t ask him because they are so angry and they can’t stop the flow of anger, and they don’t want to direct it at him. Or maybe they are just so conditioned to him not telling them the truth.

Dany is actually pretty good at absorbing just how pissed his parents are. She tells them everything that she can tell them, taking into consideration the security breach to press that she is the root cause of. She actually tells them information that they already heard from Drogo, but they apparently need repetition in order to feel somewhat placated.

Grey can feel his brother’s warm hand on his shoulder as all of this happens. It’s the only place his brother will touch him, because Azzie is so afraid of exacerbating any of Grey’s injuries.

After his parents get tired — after about another hour of this, his parents are calm enough to ask Dany permission to take him home — which catches her off-guard. 

She is blinking rapidly, as she tells them, “It’s up to him. Grey, do you want to go home?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Because of all of the emotional hubbub, they have completely forgotten about Missandei — they actually didn’t even know that Missandei had stayed back at work waiting for just a glimpse of him. 

It’s another thirty minutes and they are long gone — fussing and crying over him at his apartment — when Missy, sitting in front of her computer, realizes that she must have missed her shot at seeing him. He must not be on campus anymore.

  
  
  


 

 


	46. Grey's mommy loves him too much

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey reverts from being an independent bachelor to being a little boy who can't even wipe his butt by himself. He LOVES it. Missy's friends wanna know why she don't have any updates on her man. It's kind of because Drogo is still a major cockblock (and also bestest boyfriend ever). There's more unsexy nudity and touching. Drogo lures Grey into a trap! And then, FINALLY, Missy is reunited with the love of her life.

  
  
  
  


 

Drogo ducks out soon after dropping off Grey and his folks at Grey’s apartment — because he doesn’t want to intrude too much on their reunion. 

Their first meaningful interaction since Grey has been back is a goodbye. Grey grumbles and rejects help from everyone as he carefully eases himself out of the passenger seat of Drogo’s car. His parents and Azzie were crammed in the backseat for the sake of his comfort. He feels unease at all of the accommodation but he’s also just so grateful to be with his family. In this way, it feels dreamlike. 

Grey stands in front of Drogo before they part ways, just tiredly looking at Drogo’s face in the dark for a beat. Then, he says, “Thanks, man.”

“For what?” Drogo says quizzically, a little horrified that he is being thanked right now — after everything that Grey’s been through.

“For everything you must’ve done for me while I was away,” Grey murmurs. “For watching after my folks.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


His mom has evidently forgotten that he is dead to her, because she is  _ all up in his business _ the moment they are alone as a family. 

She is near-hysterical and manic as she starts trying to take care of him. She is contending with her own guilt for abandoning him and letting him think that she didn’t absolutely and completely love him while he was being abused and hurt in such a fucking terrible place.

The guilt is choking, and all she can do is put on a kettle on his stove and try to absolve her wrong-doing by smothering him. 

She rushes into his room and gathers clothes for him. She runs the water in the tub so that his skin doesn’t have to touch cold water. She starts yelling at her husband and other son, for their relative inaction. And then she resents it when her husband asks her to calm down. She starts freaking out on all of them because there is only prepackaged food in the fridge and nothing to actually cook with. She viciously derides this disgusting Western food because she hates it and all that it stands for. 

Grey is initially stunned that there is even real food in his fridge — that his fridge isn’t just full of moldy, crusty old shit — but then he realizes that Drogo has been here.

His mom starts to stir up his anxiety again — he starts to feel pretty stressed out and people-averse again. She is talking at him a lot and asking a lot from him — like she wants answers on what he wants to do next and the order in which he wants to do things. Before he even gets a chance to answer her, she starts answering for him. She tells him he needs to get clean first, as she starts rolling up her sleeves. He watches her in silence and dread, as he understands that this woman intends to personally bathe him with her own two hands, like back when he was a child. 

His heart is pounding, and he is gripping the doorknob to the bathroom really tightly as he backs away from her — as he watches his mom advance on him — in fear. He is irrationally afraid of his own mother because a lot of people have stripped him naked against his wishes in the recent past. A lot of people have handled his body against his will in the recent past.  

His brother and dad catch on. His brother actually says, “Ma, why don’t you take a seat, and Grey will just holler if he needs —”   


“Don’t talk to me like that!” their mom snaps.

“Sanaa, he is fine. He can shower by himself —”

“I’m just helping!”

Grey doesn’t want to hurt her — but he still softly says, “Mom — can — can I — I’d like to do this alone.”

It doesn’t matter than he tried to lessen the blow of the statement. She still looks like he has slapped her in the face — she tears up, her eyes going watery. 

And then she valiantly says, “Of course, baby. Anything you need.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He wonders if it’s misguided pride, that has resulted in him really struggling as he tries to pull off the clothes he is wearing, around the pain saturating his body. He wonders what his family must think of him now, just fucked with bad luck and extra crippled. He wonders just how often his parents must mourn for his childhood, back when they were closest to one another and back when he was actually happy.

He fucking  _ gives up  _ on fending for himself when he spots a black hair tie on his bathroom sink, next to his toothbrush. It is hers. She must have accidentally left it here during one of the times she visited him at his apartment. 

So he runs down the list of his family members. He has to decide who he is most okay with getting help from as he is like this. He remembers being really young and just being naked around his mom and dad all the fucking time, like it was no fucking big deal. 

He calls out, “Azzie!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He decides to get help from his brother only because his brother is the least likely to fucking cry all over him once he sees what Grey’s body looks like these days. He doesn’t have the capacity or the eloquence to explain this to their mom and dad, so he hopes that they don’t hold this against him. 

“This is tight,” Azzie mutters, trying to break the awkwardness, as he gingerly tries to pull the shirt Grey is wearing off of his body.  

“Yeah, they guessed my size wrong,” Grey explains. “Or they did it on purpose. Or maybe it’s normal. They tend to wear things more fitted over there.”

The very, very casual reference to Valyria, coming out of Grey’s mouth like that — actually makes his brother get emotional — and angry for a moment. 

Then Grey says, “Why don’t you get scissors?” He then lamely adds, “I mean, it’s not like I wanna keep these clothes.”

Azzie wordlessly runs out the bathroom to grab the scissors. He carelessly leaves the bathroom door open a crack, which causes Grey’s anxiety to rebloom hotly as he nervously waits for Azzie to come back, nervous that their mother is not going to be able to contain herself — that she’s going to burst in here and start scrubbing him down with soap and her bare hands like how she used to when he was five years old. 

She doesn’t do that. Azzie actually reappears quickly, sliding in between the door and the jamb before he shuts the door tightly behind him.

And then he starts cutting the clothes off of his little brother.

Azzie manages to hold it mostly together until after Grey’s pants are off After the pants are taken care of and Grey is naked, Azzie tries not to look, even though he knows what has happened to his brother.

Azzie just pleads as he looks at the wall. He says, “Nudho — just come home with us. Just — just leave this shithole,  _ please.” _

Grey doesn't have much to say, in response to that. He doesn’t know what to say, to explain everything that has happened to him and why he keeps making decisions that go against his own self-interest. He just awkwardly starts climbing into the tub.

  
  
  
  
  
  


The water feels cathartic — simultaneously nourishing and painful against his raw skin. The water comes off of him dirty and brown, from weeks of grime and clotted blood. As he clutches the wall to ensure he doesn’t fall down, he remembers one of the last times he was with her. They were in a shower together, a lot like this. And she was sobbing as she looked down at his body. 

His brother is torn between giving Grey his privacy and making sure Grey gets the help he needs, so Azzie is an amorphous shape behind the frosted glass door of the shower, hovering constantly.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Azzie leaves him alone for a bit after helping him into his loose baggy clothes. 

Grey’s gums bleed as he brushes his teeth. So that’s just great. Eating hurts because the inside of his mouth is all jacked from him accidentally biting himself when he got punched in the face. He tells his mom the first part, and she is pissed off all over again — that his work left food in his fridge that he cannot eat. “It’s a slap in the face!” she says.

“Drogo bought that food for me, not work,” he corrects, groggily, but at least, clean and smelling not like shit for the first time in a long while. “He didn’t know. He doesn’t mean it to be a slap in the face.”

“Oh,” his mom says, immediately mollified. “That’s so nice of him. He’s a really nice boy, baby.” And then she starts diverting her nervous energy to the stove. She starts boiling the shit out of some rice so that she can make him a tasteless porridge to drink.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey’s about to crash — Azzie is already snoring on the couch in the living room due to the exhausting day of travel and then waiting in anticipation and fear — but Grey feels bad about abandoning his parents by going unconscious. He knows they are irrationally scared that he’s going to go to sleep and then just never wake up again. He actually has some of the same kind of fear. He keeps thinking that the doctor made a mistake and that he’s actually real fucked after all. The first time this happened, he woke up without a penis. It is altogether strange that the second time this happened, he’s just going to heal with largely no other physical consequences.

Both of his parents’ hands are on parts of his body as he lies down on his bed. His dad’s hand is firm on his leg, on his calf and ankle. His dad has been nervous about getting too physically close to him — which Grey has noticed, but doesn’t know the reason for. In contrast, his mom would crawl in bed with him if he even gave her the barest of signals. His mom’s hands are on his head, his face. 

He can smell his sheets. He discovers that Drogo must have washed his sheets recently. 

The lights are off, so it’s dark. His parents are these looming shadows, these sentinels hovering around him and touching him to keep reminding themselves that he is real and corporeal.  

This entire thing is kind of weird — but he understands how attached to him they currently feel. 

“We love you so much,” his dad admits, still sounding really scared.

The words kind of make him feel awful — just terrible because he has done this to them. He copes by saying, “Are you guys gonna be doing this all night?” He’s trying to lighten the really heavy mood. “Are you guys just gonna watch me sleep like a couple of creeps?”

He can’t believe it himself, that less than a day ago, he was chained to a wall, made to pee in a bucket, and scared his family was dead because of him. He can’t believe that now he has access to a toilet, is free to move however he wants, and is in the gentle presence of his mom and dad. 

Rather than answer him directly, his mom softly says, “Do you remember when you used to climb into bed with us in the middle of the night?”

“Yeah, I was doing it forever, until I was way too old to be doing it,” he mutters. “Azzie told me that I was a freak and that it was gonna mess me up when I grew up.” 

His brother actually used to tell him he was going to turn out gay if he kept deriving comfort from their parents in that way. 

Grey sighs easily — as he relaxes a little bit more. “Well, joke’s on him. I’m perfectly normal.”

“I don’t think it’s weird,” his mom says, her voice petulant and young-sounding, sounding like she is mimicking her students. “Why is it weird to sleep with your parents?”

“Sanaa,” his dad’s deep voice cuts in quietly. “What you just said sounded very fucking weird.”

His mom tuts her tongue. She starts to lightly argue with his dad — as Grey starts to drift off. She says, “You have a dirty mind. It’s not sexual. There is nothing wrong with a good son who sleeps with his mother because he loves her.”

“Okay, that’s it. Get up. Let’s go. We  _ really _ need to get out of here and give our adult son his privacy so he can rest.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


News about his return has not hit the press yet, so as far as her dad knows, Grey is still gone and she is still devastated over it. 

His voice is gentle and careful, when he sees her enter the house and drop her keys off at the side table. He just says hello and tells her he’s about to go to bed. He refrains from being in her face all the time because he thinks that’s what he would want, if he were in her position. He doesn’t understand that if her mother were still alive, her mother would be doing a lot of mothering. Her mother would force her to talk. Her mother would force her to articulate it. Her mom would force her to just let it all out and just cry as much as she needs to.

Missandei more or less stays awake the entire night, lying on her back in her bed, with one hand behind her head and the other resting on her stomach. She is bitterly pessimistic about herself, so she thinks about how Grey probably doesn’t want to see her anyway. People say all sorts of things when they think they are about to die. He was noble, and he just didn’t want her to feel bad at the end. 

She thinks about how self-serving she always is, how she is always concerned with herself and her own wants and her own needs, how their story is really not what she had previously qualified in her head — the growing closeness of two really compatible people. Their story is actually him trying to live his life and her constantly intruding on it because she is self-serving. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


She doesn’t get a chance to see him at all for the rest of the week. No one else besides Drogo gets to see him. 

Alayaya and Kojja think she has information they don’t. They expectantly corner her and grill her about how he is doing. Alayaya is wearing a skin-tight halter top that pinches into her breasts — her second shift is starting soon — as she looms over Missandei and asks, “Now that Grey’s back, are you gonna go back on hooker duty soon? I mean, not to make it about me, but I’m really tired of this shit.”

“How’s he doing?” Kojja asks. “He coming into work next week?”

“How does he look?” Alayaya heaps on quickly. “I heard he does not look great. But just how bad is it actually? Is it like, really bad? Like,  _ last time _ bad?”

“You must be so relieved, huh?” Kojja continues, pressing her forearm against the cubical wall, leaning against it. “You must be so happy to have him back, huh?”

“What’s his emotional state like?” Alayaya adds. “Is he okay? God, I can’t fucking believe what happened to him!”

Two pairs of browns eyes stare down at her expectantly. She is sitting down in an office chair, in front of her computer, staring back up at them. And then she more or less cringes and then internally gulps in nervousness. She feels excessively vulnerable, as she admits, “I haven’t seen him yet.”

_ “What!” _ Alayaya barks. “How have  _ you _ not seen him?”

“His family is here,” Missy explains weakly. “He should be spending time with them. I can wait.”

“Oh my God, if it were Xhondo, I’d be like, get the fuck out, Cherrie, I need to personally make sure my man is okay, _ ” _ Kojja says. And then her voice flattens a little as she clarifies. “Cherrie is Xhondo’s mom’s name.”

In response to this, Missy’s face flushes really hot. For various reasons.

  
  
  
  
  
  


After getting the okay from Selmy, Grey spends three days and then the weekend with his family. He gives this time over to them because they just seem like they really, really need it and he owes it to them. He also gives this time to them because he’s fucking useless and can’t work with his broken body anyway, so it’s a no-brainer, actually. 

His mom and dad drive him to the dentist who, after a deep clean and a fluoride rinse, ends up being another person who tells him he’s just gonna be just fine.

Over dinner with his folks and brother, over a beer at Grey’s apartment, Drogo points the bottleneck at Grey, gestures to the spread Grey’s mom made, and calls it recuperation. Drogo is here because Drogo apparently has a texting relationship with his folks now. It seems kind of fucking weird — but Grey’s mom texted Drogo and told him to come over for dinner. 

Drogo says, “You look loads better already, bud. You’ll be in tip-top shape again real soon.” 

“So he can go back out there and get himself killed,” his mom cuts in flatly.

Grey swings his eyes real quick to his mom, who still insists on being a real downer about his job. He sees his dad reaching out to squeeze his mom’s hand, not in comfort, but in warning. His dad has actually been really great. His dad has been running a lot of interference between his need for some peace in his head and his mom’s need to tell him  _ everything she is thinking. _

“More like so he can go back out there and continue saving lives,” Drogo smoothly corrects — just like he doesn’t even give a fuck. Because he doesn’t. He finds it’s been freeing and also of relatively little consequence — his constant minor rule-breaking. It’s been helpful to tell Grey’s folks a little bit about what their son actually does. “There are few people  _ on the planet _ who have the skillset he does,” Drogo adds. 

“That’s a little overstated,” Grey says, pulling a bowl of warm soup up to his face to sip from — gingerly being careful with the cut on his lip.

“Nah!” Drogo says, fondly reaching out to grab Grey by the back of the neck, squeezing hard.

Grey twinges — as a jolt of pain runs up and down his spine.

His mom  _ freaks out _ over that. She snaps, “Drogo! You’re hurting him!”

“Nah,” Drogo says, even as he releases his hold. He’s tired of people talking about Grey like he is wounded little baby bird — people at work, Grey’s family. He thinks it is condescending because Grey is not at all a wounded little baby bird.

  
  
  
  
  
  


While his parents do dishes, while Azzie studiously turns on the TV and starts watching it to give Drogo and Grey some semblance of privacy, Drogo and Grey go out onto the balcony to have a chat.

Instead of talking about anything secretive or substantive, Drogo just laughs as he lights up a cigarette. He mutters these abstract promises — kind of to Grey, kind of himself. Drogo says, “Just one,” as he sucks in and the tip of lit cigarette glows. 

“Off the wagon again?” Grey murmurs, leaning against his railing.

“Yeah, a little,” Drogo admits, his face cracking into a sardonic smile. “This whole situation with you has been really stressful _ for me, _ you know?” 

As Drogo laughs, an opaque billow of smoke flows out of his nostrils and mouth — Grey can smell it. And it’s actually  _ so nice, _ to be at home on a balcony with Drogo, getting dirty smoke blown in his face.  

“You’re gonna have to do some press soon,” Drogo adds. “You know that, right? Leadership is going to insist.”

“Sure,” Grey says, shrugging lightly. 

_ “Sure,” _ Drogo says, lightly mocking. “So amenable you are.”

Grey shrugs again.

“Missy is going to go completely fucking nuts when she finally sees you,” Drogo continues. “She was driving me completely batshit while you were gone. Do you want me to bring her over, so you guys can get reacquainted in private?” Drogo scrunches up his face as he blows out another cloud of smoke. “Why does that sound so sexy? Shit.” He laughs again.

Grey has to awkwardly wait out Drogo’s long laugh, before he has a chance to answer. 

He actually isn’t ready to see her yet. He actually feels a lot of dread inside, over the prospect of seeing her again. 

He says, “No. I’ll just see her at work next week.”

Drogo raises his brows at that, as he trains his eyes on Grey’s face, as he holds his ashy cigarette in between his teeth. “Is everything okay between you guys? Did something happen in Valyria?”

“A lot of things happened in Valyria,” Grey says back — quietly — and also kind of bitterly and angrily.

“Sorry,” Drogo mutters, sucking down the last of his cigarette. They have to go back inside soon. He can feel Grey’s mom hovering.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Over the weekend, his mom gets offended when he gains some semblance of his old self and carelessly teases her and tries to bond with her by telling her that she actually likes that he’s useless and dependent on her. She  _ likes _ that he has given her a reason to mother him again.

Her hands momentarily freeze on his bare back, before they transfer to his arms. She's changing his bandages. And she snaps at him and says, “I do not like that you are hurt! How can you say that!”

He says, “Relax, Ma. It was a joke. Obviously you hate that I’m fucked up like this.”

“You’re not fucked up!” she corrects, as they hear his brother cracking up quietly in the background, on the couch. “You’re perfect!”

“Okay, so I can’t win,” Grey says, shrugging lightly, as he leans back a little bit further to give his mom better access to the stitches on his stomach. She ran around all over town with his dad trying to find some sort of special balm and powder to put on his gaping wounds. He is pretty sure the balm is just a menthol-based ointment. He is pretty sure her special powder is just crushed up antibiotics. He is pretty sure his wounds are burning and smelling needlessly like tea tree oil. But doing this stuff for him has given his mom some control over him back, which seems to make her happier, so he’s fine with it.

  
  
  
  
  
  


His dad tries something new and scary. His dad puts his foot down with his mom. His dad has evidently had some sort of talk with his mom behind closed doors about how she needs to fucking chill out on his job for a little bit — at least until he’s more healed. 

Grey expects a real knock out fight Monday morning over the fact that he is going into work. 

And so he is just stunned as he stands in the middle of the living room, dressed and with his keycard in his hand, as his mom cheerfully hands him a thermos cup full of dark coffee and says, “For you, baby,” and then says a fat fucking  _ nothing _ about how he’s a fucking moron who never learns, one who is going back to a death trap.

She actually hands him a small plastic baggie with two wax paper bundles inside. She tells him, “Snacks. For you and Drogo.”

His parents drop him off at work, right outside of the secure area — and it feels weird and eerie on a few counts. It feels weird that they don’t talk about it. They just make small talk about what they are going to eat later. It also feels weird to be going back at work because all he still remembers is being imprisoned. It feels like a lifetime ago, that he was working a normal job. 

The last weird thing is that he’s being dropped off by his parents — who know more of what he does for a living now — it feels oddly infantilizing and relieving. It feels humiliating and wonderful.

“We’ll be back in a few hours,” his mom tells him.

“That’s enough time for your meetings,” his dad tells him. “But not enough time for you get yourself fucked up again.”

“We’ll pick you up at one o’clock!”

Drogo is waiting for him at the entrance — they can see him from the car. His mom waves excitedly to Drogo, who waves back. 

It is fucking weird that people think he needs to be escorted into a fucking secure building. And he can walk pretty okay. He gets up to Drogo and slaps a high-five into Drogo’s hand, even as he resents the supervision. 

It completely makes sense just five minutes later. 

Drogo’s hands are strong and firm on Grey’s shoulders, as Drogo leads him into the bullpen — 

Which erupts into really loud applause and . . . fucking confetti streamers?

Grey says, “Oh God, please no. Dammit, Drogo!” as he tries to turn around so he can walk the  _ fuck out _ of this shit.

Drogo’s hands hold him in place. Drogo safely pushes him into the room of waiting coworkers. He understands why his parents were totally okay with driving him to work now. It’s because they knew he had a party waiting for him. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


It takes her forever to get even a good look at him — because everyone is crowding around him like they don’t even give a shit about overwhelming him. 

She has to wait out Yara, who she didn’t even realized was so fond of Grey. Yara takes up nearly twenty minutes with him. 

She has to wait out Kojja and Balaq and Tal, who at least have the decency to approach him efficiently as a group.

She has to wait out Alayaya, who tries to feed him cake that he refuses to eat. And Missy has to suppress this stupid feeling of jealousy as she reminds herself that she has no claim to him and he  _ just _ got back so she can’t be fucking  _ jealous already. _

She has to wait out Selmy, who basically spends nearly an entire hour sitting with Grey. Grey listens attentively and gravely nods a lot during that entire conversation. 

And by the time she even gets near him — he has to get up to go to a meeting with Dany and leadership.

He looks startled to see her — to see her right in his face.

“Hi,” she says, as her eyes scan over his entire face — over all of his new injuries. She sees the discoloration on one side of his face. She sees his tender bottom lip, split with a cut. She sees swelling on his jaw and around his right eye. She just sees what they’ve done to him.

In this moment, she just knows — that she is  _ so _ in love with him. It is desperate and pathetic and just unceasing. 

“Hey,” he says back to her, as his brows knit together. 

“You’re back,” she says to him.

“I am,” he faithfully answers.

She really likes that this reunion is happening in front of everyone. It feels  _ great _ and scrutinizing. 

He is simultaneously trying to remember and  _ not _ remember the last thing he said to her — when he thought that he was never going to see her again. He knows that he said some really fucking crazy shit to her when he thought he was about to die. He hasn’t been letting himself think about her very much because  _ everything _ has fucking changed.

“Grey!” Dany hollers from the doorway. “Sorry to interrupt guys, but Grey — we have a meeting right now.” 

They are actually a few minutes late, but Dany felt bad about interrupting them and held off until she couldn’t anymore.

“Sorry,” Grey mutters, as he starts backing away from Missandei. “I’ll catch you later, okay? We’ll talk, okay?”

“Yeah,” she says softly, nodding, as she watches him run off with Dany.

  
  
  


 


	47. Grey gets some R&R

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey continues healing his body under his mommy's oppressive love of him. Missy spends this episode yearning a little bit, loving from afar a lot. Dany continues silently hating herself. Drogo seems pretty okay!

  
  
  
  
  
  


 

She feels like she’s constantly trying to atone and also make up for lost time. As they wait for the elevators to arrive, she looks over at his face — at his profile. She winces still, because he’s weeks or more away from looking like his normal self again. 

She apologizes. She says, “Sorry about that,” very mildly, but earnestly.

He tilts his face over to look at her in question. He doesn’t know what she’s sorry for.

As the elevator chimes, notifying of its arrive, Dany clears her throat and stares ahead as the doors open. She says, “Sorry for pulling you away from your party.” She says this because she still feels entirely awkward about the thing he and Missandei have going on.

“It’s fine,” he says, as he gestures for her to enter the elevator first. “I was ready to move on from it anyway.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He ends up going past one o’clock, debriefing  _ again _ with various entities. There’s no moment for him to text his parents to tell them he’s running late. It would involve him interrupting the meeting to tell leadership that he has a daytime curfew and his mommy and daddy are going to be annoyed with him if he is late.

This time, he is recorded during the debrief. Under his breath, he asks Dany why he is being interviewed alone — why not with Missandei? At which point, Dany tells him that Missandei was extensively interviewed when she first got back. Also, they want to get his recollections down without them being influenced by Missandei’s memories. They are testing the veracity of the information. It’s protocol. 

He remembers that his other significant debriefing after Bolton actually happened apart from Theon, too. It happened with Missandei from his hospital bed. He remembers this grim sense of duty driving his detachment as he relayed these terrible recollections to her, as she faithfully collected the information without commentary. He just didn’t think about it or her as much back then.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He’s breathing hard in the sun when he sees his parents again, waiting patiently in the car for him. He’s panting because he ran out to meet them with a bunch of apologies ready on his tongue. He’s sweating and his mind is whirring with an overwhelming list of things he has to do. He has to meet with legal. He has to schedule more appointments with health professionals. He has to get cleared by psych if he wants to go back to work. He has to decide whether or not he will go back to work full time and when. He has to see if he has to pull a lot of his life shit off of hold, like his bills. He has to check in with so many people on a personal level — he has to properly thank Drogo again, he should check in Daario and Gendry and Alayaya and Kojja and Yara — he has to schedule that talk with Missandei and ready himself for a lot of stress and terrible feelings to come out because _ of course _ they will relive what has happened to the both of them together. He has to listen and hear all the things she must be wanting from him. He has to fight through all of the things in his head and give her a proper answer to it all. He has to sleep more. He has to eat better. He has to gain weight because he lost so much of it when he was being held by the Valyrians. He has to examine what it means, that now the euphemism for his imprisonment has lifted a few levels to “held.” He really needs to decide whether he wants to stay in this job and allow this shit to continue happening to him. Is he just a fucking suicidal moron?

He has so much to say to his parents. He has so many sorries to say to them. 

He’s panting so hard — gulping in hot swatches of muggy air. At first, he thinks that he’s so fucking out of shape now because being chained up for two weeks and prevented from moving a muscle at all has really fucked up his body — and then he realizes that he’s actually hyperventilating. What’s going on with him isn’t just physical, but also mental and emotional.

His mom sees him bend over and fight for breath — and she’s so worried for him that it causes her to yell at him. She is distraught and so pissed at him for never talking good enough care of himself — but she mostly hates all of these white people who don’t care about him and his terrible deathly job. So she yells at him. She shouts, “Don’t run!” far too late. “Just take your time and walk!” 

It takes him a few long minutes to get a better handle on himself. In those minutes, he fights with his slamming heart, his racing pulse, this overwhelming and choking fear that he’s never going to be okay again — that he’s fucked up like this forever now.

He says, “I’m sorry I’m late.” 

His mom disregards his apology because she actually doesn’t care that he’s late. She cares that he keeps running himself into the ground. She continues her diatribe by the time he enters the air-conditioned car, tucking into the backseat. He feels his dad’s eyes watching him through the rearview mirror, so he turns his face away, gazing out of the window. 

“You never listen,” she tells him. “You just run, run, run headfirst without listening to your body. Do you want to be hurt all the time? Do you want to be in pain? If you fight your body on its healing, it will take longer to heal! Do you know that? You need to rest. We’re going to take you home so you can sleep! I’m going to make you tea so you can sleep!”

“Sanaa,” his dad says gently. “He gets it. Maybe give it a rest. He already feels bad.”

“What!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Everyone assumes she’s going to go right back to her regular job now that he’s back, so that is how they talk to her. For the rest of the day — and she realizes that Grey has gone home already — even Drogo talks to her with a modicum of respect. He talks to her about sitting in on the next team meeting because they could use her brain on a few things. He says it without self-consciousness, like he has completely forgotten just how  _ awful _ he was to her when he was worried about Grey. 

She gets a meeting invite soon after their brief chat at her desk.  

She spends the rest of the day just doing a lot of monthly administrative stuff. She quality-checks other people’s data findings, for instance — a fat stack of files that have been accumulating because she likes to put this off a little bit, since it is so boring. This was actually one of the motivations for her to leave her old job. Certain aspects of it was dreadful and boring.

Today, she doesn’t mind as much. It affords her some time to think as she slowly works on autopilot. 

Things are different. She knows this much. He is going through a lot. She also knows that much. When she thinks about requesting some time from him so that she can ask him a bunch of questions about them and where they are at and his feelings — it feels wholly selfish and outrageous. He just got back. She saw how everyone crowded him at his party. She saw how it was a struggle for him to carry on so many conversations. She noted how some people were ridiculously stupid, how Pod couldn’t handle the awkwardness, so Pod started telling Grey about his weekend and how he built a computer with friends. She saw how Pia fought back tears as she told Grey how brave she thought he was — and Missandei watched him struggle before he patted Pia on the shoulder and told her it was okay. Missandei saw how Grey fought to find responses to every frivolous thing he was being burdened with.

She doesn’t want to be another person in his life who does this to him. 

She is very reluctant to intrude upon his life — as much as she just  _ misses him _ and feels like she  _ needs _ to ensure with her eyes and her hands that he is really  _ okay.  _ She is sure that acting out this inclination is no good for him. He deserves peace, after what he has been through.

She bitterly wonders why this epiphany is occurring more than two years too late. She wonders why it didn’t come to her back when he was lying in a hospital bed with bandages wrapped around his hips. She fucking wonders why this didn’t occur to her when she was pushing him to be her boyfriend or all the times he clearly told her he did not want to be in a relationship or to date her. 

She thinks about how torn up he was over his estrangement from his parents — and how she  _ knew that  _ about him. She thinks about how, in response to his pain, she had sex with him instead of trying to get him to talk about it. 

She thinks about the time he smacked her in the face to keep her safe. And then the times he tied her up before sex. She thinks about what he must’ve been feeling when he did those things. She thinks about how she held these things in her head and then completely freaked out and held up these things as reasons for his untrustworthiness, his capacity for violence, his dangerousness, and as evidence of his apparent mental deficiencies. She thinks about how she just couldn’t wait to flip on him after he stopped giving her what she wanted from him.

Before the end of the day, she thinks about what loving him actually should look like, before she puts in a request with Selmy to go back into the field.

  
  
  
  
  
  


His mom is actually much more relaxed and thus nicer to him when they get back to his apartment. She starts to mother him again — but more carefully and less intrusively. 

She still makes him lie face down on the bed so that she can apply her homemade salve to his bare back. She tells him that the medicine will pull the impurities from his body and his healing will hype up. He knows this is entirely untrue, but she seems to need this, so he pulls off his shirt and obediently lies down.

“You’re so thin,” she tells him, unhappy about it. “I’ll make you a big dinner after this.”

He doesn’t want to eat big meals. It’s currently hard for him to eat big meals because he’s been conditioned to eat really small meals. He would like to ramp up to big plates, but he suspects his mom will fight him on this desire. So he doesn’t protest. He just murmurs that it sounds nice and he’ll do his best to put weight back on. 

He does speak up and flip out a little bit, when his mom spontaneously grabs the waistband of his boxers and just  _ pulls them down.  _ He is like, “What the fuck! Mom!” as he pushes his hands into the mattress and rises a little bit, turning his face to her in accusation and alarm.

She takes her hand and pushes his shoulder back down. She says, “Relax — I’ve seen your bottom many times before,” as she starts slapping salve onto his butt. 

He doesn’t fucking get how menthol and antibiotics on his ass is going to speed up his healing — but okay. 

He slowly lies back down, presses his hot face into his pillow. He doesn’t relax further than that, as he just puts up with his mom rubbing ointment into his butt. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Her dad constantly has the TV turned to broadcast news these days, because he thinks this is one small additional way that he can be watching out for her. News of Grey’s release is very quick and has minor coverage, compared to his detainment. The news has been more focused on the fallout from the release. A series of protests broke out over his release in Valyria, the largest one being in the downtown corridor, largely nonviolent for now. Thus far, there have been a lot of talking heads on the news — experts that talk about how what has happened will affect Valyrian relations with the West and also Valyrian politics for years to come. 

Her dad quietly mentions this to her over dinner. He softly comments that she must be relieved that he is back home again. 

It makes Missy think of Grey’s friend and her daughter and how they are doing — if they are mostly able to avoid the backlash from his release.

“So, when are we finally gonna meet him?” Moss says, folding his hands together in front of him, as Mars lifts the lid and lets steam escape from a pot of soup that their dad cooked. He is kind of joking — kind of trying to lighten the mood.

“Never,” she says flatly. And that is all she says. It makes things a touch more awkward and tense. 

Her dad clears his throat — exchanges quick glances with her brothers — because they’ve been talking among themselves about her, too. They’ve been talking about how maybe she should see a shrink at work or take some time off of the job or  _ something,  _ to just be able to get what has happened to her off of her chest. They have been feeling like she would not respond well at all, to these suggestions.  

“I imagine things will be very hectic for a while for everyone,” her dad says diplomatically.

“Sure,” she says.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He stops by because it only just occurred to him to check in. It only just occurred to him to put this on his list of things to do. 

He doesn’t make up a full-on appointment. He might not be ready for that yet. 

When Sam spots him — Sam looks momentarily rattled and surprised — before Sam stands up and releases this huge grin.

Sam actually hugs him really tightly — it’s probably unprofessional and maybe inappropriate — as Grey smiles and hugs Sam back.

And then, aghast, Sam pulls away and holds his hands up. He says, “I’m sorry! You’re injured of course! I wasn’t thinking! Are you okay?”

“I’m completely okay,” Grey says easily, because today is a good day for him. “Physically, at least.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He goes from not seeing Daenerys at all to seeing her a fair bit. She even comes over to his apartment after work so that his parents don’t constantly have to drive him to campus just to have a quick meeting. 

His parents recognize that Dany is his big boss — the person who controls so much of his life and also the person who sanctioned these engagements that have led to his near-death — so they have a complex response and manner of dealing with Dany. 

They treat her with the utmost respect, for instance — because they understand she is very high up in the organization. They are overly hospitable and try to overfeed her even though she barely nibbles on their offerings. Then afterward, behind her back after she is gone, they viciously deride her failings and shortcomings and heartlessness between themselves — sometimes within earshot of Grey.

“It will be less than fifteen minutes,” Dany promises him, on the tail end of explaining to him how a live satellite interview will work. She finagled it so that he doesn’t have to go anywhere. His interview can be streamed from the comfort of his home. Others will be done over the phone. He doesn’t have to go anywhere to take care of this aspect of tying up loose ends. 

“Okay,” he says, leaning back against his railing. “No prob.” The balcony is the only place they have solid privacy. His parents and brother always offer to lock themselves in a bedroom and wait for him to finish his work meetings with Dany, but the idea of that seems severe. 

“Do you want to go over some talking points?”

“Sure.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She arrives late, as she often does to these things, and she ends up sitting by herself at a plastic table with a paper plate of carb-heavy food — as she often does at these things. She ignores the way other women furtively look at her. She ignores the way they don’t include her in their conversations about dirt bike racing. She knows it’s partly her own fault, for sitting so far away from them. 

She shovels potato salad into her mouth, scrolling through her work emails as she mindlessly eats. She carelessly watches one of the kids at the party eat grass because one of the other kids dared him to. It only occurs to her that, as an adult, she should’ve intervened — after she watches a frazzled woman in capri pants run up to the kid and condescendingly explain to him why he shouldn’t eat grass.

After finishing her plate of potatoes, beans, and eating a hotdog, maybe for the very first time in life — it is not at all what it’s cracked up to be — Daenerys silently takes her plate into the house to deposit it and the plastic fork into a garbage bag. She also has to ignore the way men furtively look at her as she walks by them.

She runs into Missandei, having just arrived and talking to Doreah, in the kitchen.

Dany automatically smiles really widely at Missandei — because she has momentarily forgotten that they are fighting. She’s about to say hello and thank God that Missandei is finally here so she finally has someone to talk to.

The smile dies off her face after they make eye contact. That’s when she remembers the last conversation they had — when Missandei kicked Dany out of her house because she was finally fed up with how terrible and callous Dany is. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Azzie has to leave before his parents do, because he has to go back to work. Grey senses that his brother couldn’t really afford to give up so much time just spent sleeping and hanging out on Grey’s couch. Grey feels guilty that he caused his brother this kind of hardship.

He doesn’t know how to offer his brother money in a way that is not emasculating and humiliating. 

When they are alone, just a trio, he asks his parents how he might do this. 

And his dad blows off his concern. His dad gruffly says, “Don’t worry about Azzie. He is fine.”

Grey also feels bad that his parents have taken so much time away from their jobs. He feels bad for their students and over all of the other things they had to drop because of him. 

He’s scared of losing them again — and he knows what things make them prone to fighting with one another. Even though he would love to have some semblance of normalcy again — he would love to gain back some independence because it’s been hard on him emotionally to be so dependent or beholden to other people all the time — he does not bring it up. He does not tell his parents that he wants to know how long they are planning on staying with him. He’s scared that they will think he doesn’t love them and they will feel hurt and angry over it. He’s scared that they will leave and stop talking to him again.  

He wades through another week with his folks — doing what they want from him. They want him to take better care of himself, so he doesn’t even try to make moves toward working again. He just lounges around the apartment. He takes short walks outside. He eats all of the food placed in front of him, even as it makes his stomach feel weird. He spends a lot of hours in his bedroom, pretending to take naps because that’s what his mom wants him to do. He doesn’t want to cause her more stress and make her more worried about him.

And he realizes that he’s doing it again. He realizes that he is parent-pleasing. He realizes that he has this bizarre fear of being his authentic self around people — even the people he loves. He wonders when it’s okay for him to try to start talking to Sam again. Maybe they will talk about this — why he’s so reluctant to be real. Maybe he fears rejection from the people he loves. 

He thinks that it can’t be as simple and straightforward as that. It just can’t be.

  
  
  
  
  
  


After most of the other guests and their children have left, after some half-hearted attempts at cleaning before Doreah’s husband stepped in and shooed them out of the kitchen, after a bunch of constant interruptions from their kids because the bedtime routine has been disrupted — after Doreah constantly says, “Mommy is talking to her friends right now, okay? Daddy will read you a story tonight, okay?” — Doreah messily twirls wine around her glass and giggles because she’s a little drunk.

She tells them that she keeps inviting them to these parties because she thinks they’d genuinely enjoy it. There are other adults around to have conversations with! There is booze!

Both Missandei and Dany are thinking that Doreah is just so fucking out of her mind and delusional. But Dany still holds up her own bulbous wine glass in air cheers, before she sucks down another sip. 

Doreah is so happy and ensconced in domesticity that she sometimes has a hard time relating to Missy and Dany. She sometimes assumes that of course they want some of the same things she does. She assumes certain things are universal — so she asks them who they are dating a lot. 

They both tell her nobody. They are not dating.

So Doreah tries to make this conversation work — all by herself. She has sensed that things are tense between Missy and Dany. She is not the sort to call it out. She is the sort to just try to smooth things over as much as possible.

“How’s work going, Dan?” Doreah asks. “I realize I forgot to check in with you on your  _ favorite thing _ in life.” Doreah giggles.

“I got demoted,” Dany says really straightforwardly. “So my favorite thing is going pretty terribly.”

Doreah laughs loudly in a cackle — because she thinks Dany is joking at first.

And when she realizes that Dany is not joking at all, she says, “What! What happened!” 

Doreah evidently does not watch enough international news aired at odd hours of the day.

Dany waves it off. She says, “Classified. Can’t tell you.”

“I’m sorry, Dan! That sounds awful! And you can’t even talk about it with anyone. That’s sucks!”

“Yeah, well, I deserved it,” Dany mutters. She thinks that Doreah’s extreme and unconditional empathy is so weird.

  
  
  
  
  
  


His parents end up answering all of his unasked questions themselves. 

His mom and dad ask him to come back to the Summer Isles with them. His dad tells him that it’s honestly been hard for them to be away from their students — but obviously it’s harder for them to be away from him, their child. This is why they have a proposal.

Grey realizes they have evidently been talking about this a lot between themselves. He realizes that they have also been treading very carefully with him, also scared to rock the boat lest they lose each another again because they keep repeating past mistakes.

“Come home with us,” his dad says softly. And then really quickly, his dad adds, “Not forever. Just for a little bit. Just for however long you want. But come back for a little bit, so that we can go back to work and still be able to spend more time with you — just at least until you are more healed.”

“You can buy a roundtrip ticket,” his mom says, already negotiating. “So you’ll know what date you’ll be coming back to King’s Landing. It doesn’t have to be an open thing at all.” 

“We’ll pay for your ticket, son,” his dad says. “Don’t worry about that. We can even book it for you. Maybe you can tell us how long you are comfortable staying?”

“We’re not trying to tell you to quit your job,” his mom says. “We know you’re an adult. We know you can make good decisions for yourself. We trust you. We just feel so attached to you right now. You’re just so . . . the island sun and air will do you good.”

“The sun here is fucking terrible,” his dad gripes. “And there’s so much pollution.”

His mom is anticipating reluctance, maybe even a fight. So before he can make up excuses and protest this, she grabs his hand and she squeezes it tight. 

She tells him, “It’s not forever. We know you we can’t keep you forever. We know you have a life here. We know you have friends like Drogo and responsibilities here. But maybe come home just for a month — for a few weeks! Maybe two weeks! Or however long you want! Anything is great!” 

“You don’t have to see anyone at home if you don’t want to,” his dad adds, kind of anticipating some sort of rebuttal. “You don’t have to see your uncles and aunties if you don’t want. We know they can be overwhelming. Just say the word — we’ll tell them to leave you alone.”

“Drogo can come visit you if you want!”

This is when Grey quizzically blurts, “What is even with your obsession with Drogo?” more to himself than to them.

“He’s a very nice boy,” his mom says, squeezing his hand tightly. “We like him very much.”

Grey scrunches his face up. He says, “Okay?”

He’s actually saying okay as a space-filler, as an acknowledgement of what she has just said.

But they take it to mean he is agreeing — he is agreeing to come home for a little bit.

His mom reaches over to grab his entire head. She is pressing kisses into the side of his face as she says, “Baby! I’m so happy you are coming home! Thank you! It will be so great for you! You’ll see!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He feels like a real tit as he asks Selmy and Drogo for some more time off. He feels ridiculous because he just took three weeks off — and now he’s asking for another two weeks so that he can go hang out on the fucking beach — all because he’s a weak little baby who cannot say no to his parents. 

Barristan is completely on board with this. Barristan is actually monumentally pleased that Grey is not trying to run headfirst back into work. 

Barristan says, “Of course! Of course! Take all the time you need!”

Grey looks at Selmy, giving his mentor a small, meaningless smile. He wonders if they are trying to get rid of him — a walking liability — again. He wonders if this is the beginning of his exile — again. He wonders if this is just the end now.

As if reading his mind, Drogo reaches out to pat Grey lightly on the back. Drogo says, “The team will be ready and waiting for you — when you get back. We’re excited to get you back. But take your time.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


During team meeting, they all get an update on Grey from Drogo. Drogo is cramming a bagel into his mouth and washing it down with coffee, as he tells them that there’s a slight delay in Grey’s return. Grey’s taking some more time with his family — and will also be unavailable for onsite meetings for the next two weeks because he’ll be in the Summer Isles. 

Drogo says, “If you need to meet with him — and only if you have to — you’ll have to conference him in and account for the time difference, alright?”

“D,” Daario says reasonably. “Obviously we’re  _ not _ gonna bug Grey and schedule meetings with him while he’s on vacation.”

“I figured,” Drogo mutters. “But he _ did _ make himself available to meet and consult, if needed.”

“Well, that’s fucking nuts,” Bronn says. “Torgo is still fucking nuts — it’s comforting that some things just don’t change.”

“Can you not?” Missandei says, cutting in.

“Not what?”

“Say he’s fucking nuts,” she clarifies heatedly. “He’s  _ not.” _

“Relax, Missy,” Bronn says. “Retract your claws. I was  _ joking. _ I have the utmost respect for Grey and his sanity.”

“How is it a joke if it’s not even a little bit funny at all?” Missandei asks rhetorically.

“Holy shit,” Bronn says, marvelling at her. “You are so  _ heated  _ right now. Okay. I will never make a bad joke about Grey ever again.”

She finds him completely condescending. 

“Okay, let’s move on now,” Drogo says dryly.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	48. Grey goes home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey gives his first TV interview before going home to chill in the Isles. Missy goes back into the field and now finally gets the respect she deserves for being convincing at sex work. She and her dad watch HBO together. Drogo visits his boy and we finally get to see Drogo RELAX. Missy's auntie still wants to know when she's gonna land a man.

  
  


 

Before he leaves for the Summer Isles, he does a live broadcast interview from the comfort of Dany’s home. He didn’t feel comfortable letting strangers see the interior of his home. He also didn’t want to go into work to be scrutinized as he does this interview in a conference room, because he’s not practiced and it’s not something he’s naturally good at.

Dany  _ is _ though, and that’s why she’s been coaching him — and for whatever reason — probably guilt — she offered to let him do it in her home office. He knows she’s notoriously private, too. They’ve known each other since he started at the organization, and this is the first time he’s ever been inside her apartment.

She offers him water and snacks — a bag of pretzels that he is sure she purchased just for him. He takes it out of politeness as they go into a room with a desk, which is already set up for a feed by a technician from Jojen’s team the day before. 

She touches his face briefly, with familiarity — without even thinking about it. It is strange because even before their falling out, she certainly wasn’t in the habit of casually touching him like this. 

He’s been very pleasant and congenial with her — possibly because he learned about her demotion. Maybe he feels guilt over it, too. Maybe guilt is the driver behind their sudden closeness. 

Whatever it is, she feels gratitude over it. She regrets shutting him out for more than a year. She completely intends to clear the air on that at some point — soon. She is just gun shy. She wants to wait for him to be more settled before she talks to him about her flaws. 

She is maybe actually cowardly.

Her action — her hand on his face — makes him look up at her from where he is seated, with his notes in his lap. She doesn’t know if it’s good or bad, for people to see his face look like this. 

“Thanks for doing this,” she says.

“It’s my job to,” he says.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Dany told him that the organization would just like for him to be honest while not breaching protocol. He doesn’t even know what  _ that’s _ about, this manipulating call for honesty. He has never heard this from them ever before. 

He realizes that he doesn’t even know how to have an opinion that isn’t managed and considered and strategic. He doesn’t know what to say, when there are no restraints on what he is allowed to be. 

The news presenters ask him if he was scared. 

He tells them yes and no. He wasn’t scared for himself, but he was scared for other people. 

His answers are very short and very succinctly to-the-point. It is completely the opposite of what Dany coached.

They ask him what he thinks about the protests that have broken out all over the Freehold because of the perception that Valyrian leaders kowtowed to the West, which got away with murder after paying blood money. 

He says that he has no opinion at the moment. Politics and international relations are not his areas of expertise so he cannot currently speak on these things.

They press him on this. They tell him that surely, with what he has gone through, he just has to have some response to the rising tensions and increasing anti-West sentiments.

He feels wholly uncomfortable with this topic — so he casts his eyes to Dany in very mild panic. She just stares back at him expectantly and kind of encouragingly. He doesn’t even know what the fuck he is supposed to say to this.

So he says, “It’s just unfortunate. I wish it wasn’t happening.”

“Were you treated well by the Valyrians, Mr. Torgo?”

“For the most part.”

“What do you think about the recent surge of anti-immigration sentiment here in Westeros?”

“I wasn’t aware there’s been a surge. If there has been a surge, I think it’s very unfortunate.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He sighs as he lifts his bag with his computer inside — he hadn’t needed it at all — and then pulls the strap over his shoulder. Dany is kind of smirking at him with one of her hands digging into her blazer pocket to fish out her phone. She watches him gather up his things to get ready to leave. And rather than voicing out loud what she is thinking, she just waits him out — until he gets psyched out and starts sheepishly avoiding eye contact with her.

Finally, he mutters, “I don’t want to stand for anything. I don’t want to be a symbol for anything. I just want to be able to live my life anonymously, in peace like a coward.”

Of course she knows this about him. Nonetheless, she gestures to him with her phone and then teasingly tells him, “You know that you will be approached with a book deal soon enough, right? You know that people will want to pay you a lot of money to talk about what happened, right?”

In response to  _ this terrible thing  _ he does not want at all, he sighs. And then he says, “I have more than enough money to retire _ tomorrow  _ if I wanted to — from the insurance payout. I’m good on money.”

In response to  _ that,  _ Dany releases a snort-laugh — and it takes Grey a moment to realize that she’s not laughing in response to what he just said. She’s actually staring at her phone screen and laughing at whatever she is looking at.

She flips her phone over and shows him the glowing screen, which he can’t read. She knows this, which is why she explains it to him. She says, “I’m reading the online comments from your TV debut —”

“Oh God,” he mumbles, dragging the unmarred skin on his left cheek down with his hand. “I don’t want to know.”

“Oh, definitely never read internet comments about yourself,” she returns casually, “but this particular thread is actually about this terribly inappropriate, terribly funny response to your interview.” And before he can tell her he  _ really doesn’t want to know,  _ Dany just says, “This woman says you can murder her vagina any time you feel like it. A bunch of other people are agreeing with her. You have a fan club.”

He flushes — and then fights through a thick wall of discomfort over listening to his big boss say the word ‘vagina.’ He says a big fat nothing in response to this. 

Also, he honestly wonders if this qualifies as sexual harassment. Like, she’s probably not supposed to say this kind of thing to him, her underling, one who has assaulted a female colleague on work premises —  _ fuck him forever _ , he will never have a leg to stand on ever again because of that particular incident.

He clears his throat. He says, “Okay, so I’ll see you when I get back from the Isles,” before he shows himself out. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


As he boards his flight with his parents — as he half-listens to his mom complain about how cold it’s going to be on the plane — he thinks about how he’s a scumbag. He thinks about how he is kind of, sort of running away. He thinks about how he knows he’s doing something a little bit bad, because of how he feels inside. He should’ve talked to her before he left, if only to tell her that he is leaving for just a little while, if only to tell her that he fully intends on letting her cash in on that talk that he promised her that they’d have. He just needs a raincheck.

Even this level of consideration and responsibility to her feels intense and overwhelming. Even carrying out normal polite pleasantries feels hard and pressurized. She deserves far better than what he is capable of. 

He thinks back to how he was listing his limitations and shortcomings and all the ways he was going to fuck up royally — right before their first real date — and he was _ the idiot _ that went on it  _ anyway. _

He’s pretty sure he’s scared of his own fucking shadow these days. He’s pretty sure he cannot even carry on a real conversation, based on the craptastic interview he gave the other day and  _ every other human interaction  _ he has recently participated in. He’s pretty sure he will curl up into a ball and start hyperventilating — if he has to engage in sex again. 

He’s so nervous to tell her these new things about himself, scared of telling her that his struggles with being  _ a person _ have only intensified. They have only gotten worse. 

The reason for his anxiety is something he’s been trying to coax out — he suspects it’s largely emotional and thus irrational. He’s been trying to figure out just  _ what  _ it is he is so fucking scared of. 

He knows that he’s kind of being passive aggressive — and avoidant. He knows that a part of him hopes that by not dealing with it at all — it will take care of itself. Like, at some point she will get fed up with him and his shortcomings and she will just make decisions for the both of them. She will just angrily peace out and move on with her life without him because she most definitely deserves so much more than him — just like how he had planned it out when he thought he was about to die.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“Ugh!” his mom says, as she flounces into the middle seat. “The air is so dry. Baby, can you get my bag for me? I want my toiletry bag.”

She is talking to his dad, not him. Not for the first time in life, he thinks that it’s a little weird-gross that his mom uses the same term of endearment for all the men in her life. 

“We’re about to take off,” his dad grumbles, even as he unbuckles and starts to stand up. “Why didn’t you think about this earlier when we were standing in line _ forever?” _

“I didn’t know the plane was cold and dry when we were standing in line!” his mom snaps.

“It is  _ always  _ cold and dry!” his dad snaps back.

Then, as he starts to shuffle back into the aisle, his dad is swiftly corrected by a flight attendant. “Sir, please take your seat!”

His dad is about to sit back down. He even makes moves toward it.

“Baby! The  _ lotion?” _

_ “Fuck!” _ his dad says, making a bunch of heads and ears on the plane perk up and then steadfastly avoid any eye contact with him due to the expletive — as he begrudgingly starts to stand up again. “This is  _ that _ important?”

“I’ll get it, then!” His mom says haughtily, already clawing her hand at his her husband’s hip. “Get out of the way!”

“No, don’t fucking get up, too!” his dad snaps. “I fucking  _ got it.” _

“Sir! Please sit! We cannot take off if you don’t sit!”

“Oh my God,  _ Dad,” _ Grey mutters in embarrassment, covering his eyes with his hand. He is embarrassed that his parents like to interact like this with each other — in public. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


She generally tries to avoid talking about him with other people and she refrains from stalking the Facebook accounts of his brother and his relatives for just tiny glimpses of him because that would be fucking pathetic and insane. 

She just thinks about him all the time. She thinks about him during every waking moment. She sometimes thinks about him while she is unconscious, too, in her dreams. Her dreams have been amorphous, neither good or bad — he is just  _ there,  _ a floating presence that feels close to her, like a ghost.

She has no close friends anymore, having distanced herself from Daario ever since she found out he was sleeping with her friend in secret. He has felt awkward enough about being found out that he has not really tried much at all to reach out to her. 

And obviously, she and Dany are still on the outs.

Her best friend is actually her dad. That’s been a joke she’s cracked a few times over the years to be cute and funny — but now it is real and it is less funny. Her dad is only her best friend because he lives with her and he keeps looking at her with puppy eyes. She doesn’t want to have the heart-to-heart he is always trying to angle at, so they watch a lot of TV together.

He likes to watch documentary series, the news, or some sort of cooking series. Their tradition is to watch the one reality show he likes on Friday nights — a food competition with children. He likes watching the kids because it can never get really nasty and he also thinks it’s funny when the kids cry. Sometimes when she is working, he refrains from watching live and waits for her — waits until they can stream it together.

Because he’s been so obsessed with her lately — and it’s nice that at least one man in the world is obsessed with her — he’s been letting her watch whatever the fuck she wants with him. She actually doesn’t care, but he’s been cajoling and pushing her to assert an opinion.

They have been watching a really sexy, R-rated series about young Black people and the people they date. Missy didn’t know it was so sexy before she started watching it. Kojja recommended it real hard during lunch one time. Alayaya echoed the recommendation. Neither of them told Missy that there’d be so much nudity and simulated sex.

So she’s been watching this with her dad. They are both entirely uncomfortable with this activity, but the alternative is having a conversation with her dad, and she’s not about that right now — so they persist in this. 

Between the two of them, her dad learns a new term: fuckboy. Her dad — a man who fell in love with a woman almost at first sight and then proceeded to court her with respectable, old-fashioned devotion — is now concerned that entire world has changed in a generation and fuckboys are a dime a dozen, a scourge that his daughter has to constantly fight off. 

A blowjob starts happening on screen — something that kind of stuns the both of them.

She can feel her dad go a little rigid.

She keeps her eyes trained on the screen. She doesn’t want to be prudish or awkward because she doesn’t want to preserve whatever is left of her purity in her dad’s eyes.  

  
  
  
  
  
  


As he lightly swings in a hammock, his leg hanging out and his toes digging into sand and his eyes looking up at palm fronds from behind shades, he observes that his folks weren’t wrong. It’s been a while since he’s been home and every time he is home again for the first time, he feels the pangs. When he walked off the plane, after Bolton, and got sucked up by the viscous heat of the island, he remembers having the most optimistic thought he could have had — at that point in time. He remembers thinking that, yes, here he can better heal.

Of course he never grew another penis and he ended up working a dead end job at a grocery store — but there is always that flare of hope at the beginning. 

“Mom wants me to come fetch you to eat while the food is still hot,” his brother announces, lightly panting because Azzie had to run out of the house just to ask Grey this question as quickly as possible, because their mom is continuing to freak out over the state of Grey’s body. She keeps thinking that — just as she nourished and helped him grow into a strong little boy through her breast when he was impossibly young — she can nourish him and help him get strong again as an adult man. 

She’s been cooking a shit ton and making him eat it as she watches him like she suspects he has some eating disorder — instead of the truth, which is what he was kind of tortured and food is just currently associated with a mess of shit in his head. 

“Dammit,” Grey mutters, rolling over and plopping out of the hammock. “I literally  _ just  _ finished eating.”

“Sorry, bro.”

“How was work? How was your day?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She stretches and then pulls on a pink stretchy dress before she adjusts her boobs in them and then shoves a tiny gun in between her legs. She smears her shiny lips together, knowing that she will have licked her lipstick clean off by the end of the shift.

She climbs into the car next to Robb. He grins at her when he sees her — and he’s so friendly and so bizarrely positive — that when he says, “It’s so great to see you like this again,” she knows that he is being real and being earnest. He is glad that she is back at work again.

It’s actually like riding a bike — getting offered a low amount money to perform the three sex acts she allows as a professional. She actually finds that she’s  _ a lot _ better at it all of a sudden. She has no anxiety over getting hurt, for one. After being hunted and nearly killed by a psychotic Valyrian and a professional contract killer, she now knows this sex work shit is pretty low-level shit. 

She also has no hang ups about the way creepy men look at her body for another — because of course this is what they do. It doesn’t feel like it cost her anything, to ask a sad and lonely guy if he wants to fuck her before she rattles off her costs. 

Sometimes she looks over at Robb, and she almost expects to see Grey’s face instead — shadowed underneath a baseball cap.  

She gets applause at the end of the shift. All of the guys on her team — Robb, Gendry, and Daario are clapping their hands because they are pleased she killed it.

Gendry enthusiastically says, “Our girl’s back, baby!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He gets to pick up Drogo by himself because his parents are still at work. He swings by their small international airport and does a few circles around before Drogo’s text finally comes in and announces that he has landed.

As Drogo throws a small duffle into the backseat of his dad’s sedan, as Drogo quickly collapses into the passenger seat, wafts off the smell of deodorant and laundry detergent, and loudly says, “What is up, man!” — Grey realizes that it is true, what Drogo has been saying about them for years now. They  _ really are _ each other’s best friend.

Grey grins a little bit — because he’s kind of glad Drogo is here. He says, “What do you feel like doing first?”

“I want you to show me your hood!” Drogo cracks excitedly, his eyes searching over the progress of Grey’s face — bruises barely there, swelling gone, cuts closing up. “But first, I wanna eat!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She runs into him at her aunt and uncle’s house party. She’s holding some punch that her brother spiked — he giggled over it like he is not a dad and like he doesn’t realize that a kid can accidentally drink from the bowl even though he put it kindaaa up high on the counter. 

She’s sipping carefully from the punch when she spots a nicely dressed man in glasses walk right up to her. He politely says hello to her. He asks her how she’s been.

She looks at him blankly initially — because she doesn’t recognize him at first — and then her mind jolts and she straightens up. She says, “Oh, Paul! How are you?”

He realizes that she had forgotten who he is — and so there is an awkward, somewhat lengthy pause. 

Then he says, “I’m doing well.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey finds that Drogo-on-vacation is an entirely different beast from Drogo-his-reluctant-boss. Drogo-on-vacation is actually this blast from the past — a lot like Drogo-his-partner. Drogo-on-vacation is relaxed, is quick to laugh, is quick to enthusiastically marvel over things, is easy to find joy — and is really gluttonous. Drogo-on-vacation  _ consumes  _ — shoving anything and everything new into his face and mouth — shooting down every liquid that is put in front of him. 

Drogo-on-vacation is kind of drunk by midday. 

He is saying, “Oh my God, I could use a cigarette right now,” as he stares off into the horizon. “God, it’s so beautiful here. That’s why I wanted to visit, you know. I mean — not only to see you — but I realize I only come here during terrible circumstances. I was telling myself, ‘D, come here when the circumstances aren’t terrible.’”

“Have you tried the patch?” Grey asks.

“Huh?”

“The nicotine patch,” Grey says, clarifying.

“Oh,” Drogo says. “No offense, bud, but I don’t need quitting advice from a non-smoker.  _ Yes,  _ I have tried the patch. Years ago. It didn’t work.”

And then Drogo spontaneously digs the heels of his hands into his eyes, clearing them out a little bit. He blinks as he looks at the ocean again.  

“Do you miss being young sometimes?” he mutters. “I do. I miss being irresponsible. I miss actually being good at and enjoying my job. I miss eating and drinking whatever the fuck I wanted to without my doctor breathing down my neck about my blood pressure and cholesterol. Christ — what if that’s the thing that kills me and not like, an assassin’s bullet?”

“I mean, likely it will be,” Grey says reasonably. “You work behind a desk now. Bad posture is more likely to kill you than a bullet.”

Drogo reaches out to squeeze his shoulder — always a few notches too hard — Grey twinges in response.

Drogo says, “I’ve missed this. I’ve missed being the fun one and you being the downer.”

  
  
  


  
  


It sounds like he has something to prove to her — maybe his viability or his importance or the fact that many, many other women think he’s a great catch. He namedrops a girlfriend for instance, as he looks at her face and searches for  _ something. _

She is like, “Oh, cool.” 

Paul asks her, “What about you? Are you seeing anyone?”

“Not currently,” she says. 

The conversation fizzles soon after that — because she’s not doing much at all to sustain it or push it along. It actually feels a lot like the handful of dates that they went on with one another, the difference now being that she cares way less about being polite and keeping up appearances. She is just allowing herself to be as dull and as lackluster as she wants to be. 

Much much later, at the end of the night with just family, as they all tiredly clean up the house and go around depositing stray paper plates into garbage bag — Missy asks her aunt if they compost and learns they certainly do not — her auntie looks at her and laughs fondly at her haplessness. Her auntie says that there’s something almost charming — the way someone as beautiful as she is, is so bad with men.  

  
  
  
  


 


	49. Missy has other romantic prospects

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Drogo and bunks down with Grey, tries to teach his boy how to loosen up. Missy continues on without the uptight love of her life. She is similarly severe. Like, she doesn't even crack a smile when Ralf gives her compliments. Theon low-key proves his sister wrong, that Grey isn't that far along on his healing and Theon isn't actually weak. All of the tender, emotional work Theon's been doing on himself is paying off! Drogo rubs his awesome relationship with Missy's ex/future man in Missy's face.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Drogo is only staying for the weekend — and so Grey’s parents told Drogo not to get a hotel. Grey thinks that it’s really weird that Drogo still has a texting relationship with his parents even now when Grey’s no longer at death’s door.

It’s not until bedtime that Grey and Drogo realize that, in the course of trying to save Drogo some money, Grey’s parents intend for Grey and Drogo to share a room. 

Grey’s mom stacked a bunch of blankets and extra towels at the foot of the bed. She kisses the both of them on the cheek before she breezes out of the bedroom to start her night ritual of a lot of creams and a lot of lotion and a lot of tea spilling with Grey’s dad about her students — who does not care that much about any of the above. 

“My brother’s old room is full of shit,” Grey explains, gesturing to his small bed. 

“I know,” Drogo says. And then upon Grey’s look of mild curiosity, Drogo adds, “Last time I was here — telling them about you — I stayed over. And I had to sleep in here because it was the only room available. And I can go sleep on the couch, man, if you want some space or privacy.”

“Nah, man,” Grey says. “It’s okay. I can sleep on the floor.”

“No, man. You gotta be comfortable. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They end up both sleeping in bed together. Drogo tries to creep Grey out by telling Grey not to back his ass into Drogo’s boner — but having known Drogo for the better part of his adulthood, Grey does not let himself get baited into another stream of bickering banter. Grey is wedged really tightly between the wall and Drogo’s shoulder and warm body — they are using no blankets because it’s entirely way too fucking hot for that. 

“Do you remember that one night we spent in the Bone Mountains?” Drogo asks, recalling another time when they slept together really closely.

“Of course I do,” Grey says, already lightly laughing. “You were so mad at me the next morning.”

“Because you just fell asleep on me!” Drogo says, his voice cracking from holding back a laugh, too. 

They were on their way to a village in Krazaaj Zasqa, where the rest of the team would meet them. They were losing time due to the terrain, getting a little sloppy because Drogo was impatient. Grey, being team lead, made the decision to stay overnight instead of trying to get down to the village in moonlight. They rappelled down to a ledge, still about 700 feet high off the ground, and bunked down for the night, tightly shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip. Drogo has a greater fear of heights than Grey, who has no fear of heights. Grey fell asleep right away, situated right next to the edge of a fucking mountain. Drogo stayed awake all night, full of anxiety, scared that Grey was going to spontaneously roll over in his sleep and fall right the fuck off the mountain. That was why Drogo was so pissed the next day — irrationally.

“I didn’t understand why you were so pissed!” Grey says. “You were pissed I got good rest in!”

“I was pissed because I was scared,” Drogo says honestly.

“That’s so bent,” Grey says, still chuckling a little bit. “If you were scared, just act scared then.”

“That’s really rich, coming from you,” Drogo murmurs. “Check it. Here’s my impression of you scared: ‘Hey, what’s up?’ Okay, so here’s my impression of you angry: ‘Hey, what’s up?’ Now here’s my impression of you horny: ‘Hey, what’s up?’”

  
  
  
  
  
  


His mom wakes the both of them up really carelessly. She bangs her massive and ancient vacuum cleaner against the closed door to the bedroom once before she swings the door open and then turns on the appliance.

Both Grey and Drogo spring right up and are leaning against each other, Grey’s hand hard against Drogo’s shoulder. Over the sound of the vacuum, he shouts,  _ “Mom!  _ You scared  _ the shit _ out of us!”

Since his mother has a better idea of what it is exactly that he does for a living — and since she has started to accept and relax into it just the tiniest bit more because she has realized that resisting it does not make it go away — she rolls her eyes. She refuses to believe that the sound of a vacuum cleaner reasonably gives her kid any fright. Her child’s life is full of danger and death threats from fucking criminals. He can handle her cleaning.

“Breakfast is ready for you boys!” she shouts, over the sound of her own vacuuming, as her son’s friend quickly shuffles off the bed to pull his bag off the ground and out of her way. 

She purses her lips as she patiently waits for Drogo to scramble back onto the bed. She has surmised that, based on his behavior around her, Drogo is probably very good to his own mother. This is another thing that she likes about him. 

She has been stockpiling a list of his positive attributes in her head, holding them all there, chief among them is how much Drogo obviously cares for her son. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


She shows up to Theon’s housewarming party with a big bouquet of flowers in hand even though she was told not to come bearing gifts. Yara crassly explained it as, except for a dick, Theon already has all the shit he could ever need or want. 

It just feels weird and like it’s inviting bad juju, to show up to a housewarming without some sort of memento.

Missy’s bouquet of flowers are actually inconvenient. When she thrusts them at Theon’s girlfriend, Ruby awkwardly takes them, avoids direct eye contact, and then awkwardly mumbles that she’s not sure they have unpacked vases. In the short pause that ensues, Missy wonders if Ruby is being a little bit of a jerk on purpose or if this is purely accidental and Ruby is just a touch socially awkward. Missy thinks that other people must wonder this about  _ her _ all the time. 

After that, Ruby is pretty fine. She hands the flowers off to Theon who, upon realizing who gave them the bouquet, starts enthusiastically catching up with Missy. He exclaims that they haven’t seen each other in  _ years,  _ not since he left the organization. He asks her what she’s been up to. He listens attentively and politely over the music, as she bores  _ herself _ to death by telling him random things about her dull life outside of work — such as her penchant for reading before bedtime and her very mild struggles with gardening. 

Her bouquet is forgotten and left on the kitchen counter after that — as Theon moves onto the next guest at the door.

  
  
  
  
  
  


It comes up because Drogo sees a gorgeous tall woman walk by with her gorgeous friend, and he straight up grins at them and holds up his beer glass in greeting. He says, “Hey, ladies. How are you doing today?” in his low, husky voice.

The women return his greeting with a head-swivel, laughter as they lean on one another, and then their feet slow down.

There is a language barrier, so Grey spends about ten minutes faithfully translating between the women and Drogo, interjecting none of his own commentary in. They talk about where Drogo is from, and instead of answering straightforwardly, Drogo takes the liberty of spinning an entire yarn that Grey has to relay to the women, who are sizing up Drogo and looking at him with intention. 

They talk about what everyone is up to today. Drogo gestures to Grey and explains that he’s here to visit his buddy and see the wonders of his buddy’s homeland — they are going to do whatever his buddy wants to show him.

Drogo asks the women if they have any suggestions — for must-see, must-do things to get the full Ebonhead experience.

Grey doesn’t really and can’t really translate the charm and doesn’t really want to translate the flirting — so he continues to just relay everything really briskly and businesslike.

The women’s eyes stay completely focused on Drogo as they giggle — which is weird to Grey because thus far, Drogo has said nothing very funny.

The conversation carries on for a few more minutes, with the women suggesting shopping places — which Grey fucking hates doing and going to — as well as various lunch spots. Grey thinks their recommendations are basic and terrible.

They are clearly coyly waiting for Drogo to invite them to lunch, and Drogo is completely about to — but this is when Grey finally decides to inject himself into the conversation. 

He says, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to keep it just you and me today. Or I can drop y’all at whatever spot you want and then come find you later when you’re ready to be picked up.”

Drogo completely expects this. So he laughs. He also says, “It’s stunning, how little game you have.”

“I have plenty of game,” Grey corrects. “I just am not feeling it right now.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Things get a little uncomfortable for her when Theon and Yara’s Ironborn friends from work — who all exclusively work in narcotics and black ops — show up. They show up to the party a few hours late and already completely wasted. 

It’s uncomfortable for her because they all start hitting on her — relentlessly — and kind of racistly. Like, they tell her she looks so exotic and they also drunkenly say, “Once you go Black, you never go back!” once or twice or  _ a dozen times  _ because Missy doesn’t think it’s fucking funny so she doesn’t laugh — and they take it to mean that she just didn’t hear the joke. So they have been repeating it.

Yara is merely amused as she phases in and out of  _ all of this harassment _ that Missandei is dealing with. 

“You’re so beautiful, baby,” Ralf says, trying to run a finger down her bare arm. “You’re so smooth and soft.”

Missy totally snatches her arm away. She says, “Please don’t touch me!” and then she internally kicks herself for saying please at all.

Ralf only laughs it off. He only says, “You’re a little tense, huh? How can we get you to relax? How about a drink?”

“I don’t want a drink!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Over lunch at a shrimp house along the bluff, as he sops up the sauce by dabbing it up with bread, Drogo bluntly asks Grey if it’s Missandei — if Missy is the reason Grey is being so uptight. 

Grey frowns at this — he also wants to roll his eyes. He is tempted to fucking tell Drogo that it’s actually his two-month, dehumanizing imprisonment at the hands of fucking Valyrians — that has made him so uptight. It’s actually getting tortured and then getting his dick cut off by a psychopath — that has made him so uptight and fun-hating. 

But yeah, the distant, third reason is a woman that he dated and still has feelings for. Sure.

Grey has his mouth open to respond. He gets as far as, “No, it’s not Miss —”

“Did you always have body issues?” Drogo cuts in — he is completely drunk again. “Or did they crop up after what happened with fucking Bolton?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


After Ralf gets bored of sexually harassing her and leaves to go find snacks, she scampers off to settle onto the couch next to Brienne, who is similarly all out of sorts at this party.

There, they create a safe little enclave where they quietly talk about the latest episode of the baking reality show competition that they are both watching when not working their highly stressful jobs. 

Their analyzing and predictions get interrupted, when the music cuts off and Theon commandeers everyone’s attention from the middle of the room — he’s standing on a step stool so that everyone can see him.

He starts his speech off by saying, “Two years ago, I met a woman who would end up saving my life.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey is a little bit drunk, too. He drank to ease some of the tension inside of his body over the course of lunch. He drank entirely too much, and now his head is dizzy and throbbing against the bright white sun. He trudges down the sand, loosely holding into his sandals, as Drogo yelps at the hot sand and scream-asks Grey how Grey’s feet aren’t just  _ burning  _ right now. 

Of course, the answer is just that he is from here, and this is his home. 

Grey plops himself down right at the edge of the slithering, frothy waves. He blinks against the sky. He waits for Drogo to catch up.  

When Drogo does and collapses heavily into the hot sand — still grumbling about the heat — Grey looks over and confesses, “I think I always had body issues. Like, I was a virgin into my twenties, man.” 

And then upon seeing Drogo’s wide and horrified eyes, Grey dully adds, “Don’t look at me like that, man. Technically I was 22. When was the first time you had sex?”

“Fourteen.”

“Fourteen!” Grey semi-shouts. “That’s so young! Oh my God, who was it with? Was it with an adult?”

“No, man,” Drogo says, scrunching up his face, throwing a loose fist right into Grey’s arm, making Grey sway a little bit. “I wasn’t  _ raped, _ G. Fucking Christ. It was with my girlfriend at the time.”

Grey kind of laughs quietly at that. He says, “Ah.”

“Why did you wait as long as you did?” Drogo prompts.

“It wasn’t necessarily by choice,” Grey says casually. “For just about my entire adolescence, I was younger than all the girls in school, and so they saw me as a little brother, not like . . . someone they were interested in.”

“Younger? Like, when is your nameday?”

“I skipped a couple of grades,” Grey says.

“Oh! That’s right! I forgot!” Drogo says, chuckling. “I forgot you were a real smartie in school.”

“Sort of.” Grey is shrugging. “I mean, the school system here isn’t great, so it’s not hard to stand out just by like, being average — that’s why my parents sent me overseas for university.”

“Makes sense,” Drogo says. “I had to leave home for college, too.”

Grey releases this little thought that he’s been keeping in the back of his mind — a thought that he’s been thinking for the past couple of years, but also one that has resurfaced since he’s been back home. 

“Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I didn’t skip the grades,” he says. “Like, if I had just stayed with kids my age, maybe I’d be like, more well-adjusted as an adult and would have like, varied interests and stuff. Maybe I’d be settled down here and would have like . . . friends and a normal life.” He pauses, staring at the horizon. “Instead of what I have now.”

It feels like a secret that he is saying — and he expects the release of it to maybe feel like a weight off his shoulders. But actually, voicing it out loud just makes him feel a little embarrassed and weighted down. The desire to be normal and to not be burdened with such responsibility and to not be so haunted by all of these shitty fucking things that have happened to him — feels  _ embarrassing. _

Drogo has a response to this already locked and loaded, because in a way, he’s been thinking about the same thing — the more time he spends with Grey’s parents, the more that he learns about their family and what they want for their son.

“That shit’s overrated,” Drogo mutters. “I’ll tell you what would’ve happened if you had stayed — and I know because we have parallel lives, man — except I’m not a genius and you aren’t as hot as I am.”

“D —”

“You’d be working a deadend, menial job in an intellectual desert,” Drogo says, talking louder. “And it’s nothing against where we come from, man. Where we come from just has been  _ stripped  _ by other countries and people. So yeah, you would probably be married by now with a bunch of kids. You’d still have your dick, probably — and you would be  _ so bored  _ by your insular life. You would feel this  _ deep dissatisfaction  _ deep in your soul — and you wouldn’t be able to put your finger fully on the pulse of it, because you just don’t know what else is out there in the world. And you would be wildly depressed — you’d probably drink yourself slowly to death because you are so fucking bored. I know you’d be bored because I know you. You like feeling stressed out. You like adrenaline. You feel alive when you are running. If you had stayed here, you’d just be standing still for the rest of your life, man.” And then unprompted, Drogo says, “Grey, come back to work. I know what you’ve been mulling over. It’s your decision, completely. But that’s my two cents. Come back to work. You  _ love  _ to work. And I would say that I can ensure you will never risk getting hurt again — but I know you won’t put up with a desk job for long at all. That’s why you ended up on the Bolton engagement, right? You were going stir-crazy being holed up in the office all the time?” 

“Yeah,” Grey says softly.

  
  
  
  


She expects a big announcement of some sort — like maybe even a marriage proposal — but in the end, she just watches as Theon positively gushes about his girlfriend and how amazing he thinks that is, for no special reason at all. He just gushes because he feels like sharing his happiness.

He tells them that she believe in him when he didn’t believe in himself. He tells them that she saved his life by entering into it when he was at his lowest point. He tells them that she taught him how to be human again — how to be a brother, a son, and a partner again. 

Missy watches as Ruby turns a little red — from embarrassment — before Ruby momentarily covers her face — before she throws her arms around Theon, gives him a big hug and kiss against his cheek, and then tells him — in front of all of them — that she loves him.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“Alright, brother,” Drogo says after climbing out of the car, outside of the airport. “Give me a hug. Say goodbye to me.”

Obediently, this is what Grey does. He thinks that this might be the first time in their entire friendship that they have done this — like, actually hugged in a real way — after years of working together really intimately, after years of sometimes struggling to keep one another alive.

Drogo crushes Grey to his body just as Grey’s arms start to come up. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


On Monday, Drogo sees her in the morning getting coffee at the machine, and he says, “Sup, Missy?” He is all tanned and relaxed-looking. “How was your weekend? I heard you murdered it your first week back. That’s fucking great!”

“Thanks, man,” she replies. 

And then she refrains from shitting on his good mood by reminding him that not too long ago, he told her that she was the reason that Grey was dying and that he would rather have Grey back and would rather she had sacrificed herself instead of the other way around. She refrains from reminding him that he told everyone that her training was a complete waste of resources and everyone’s time because she was deluded into thinking that she could be and do more than what she currently was doing.

Instead, she tells him, “My weekend was fine. Pretty chill. You?”

“Mine was great. I got to hang out with Grey and check out his hometown with him all weekend.”

Oh. She didn’t realize that’s why his mood is so good. 

“Oh, that sounds fun,” she says dully.

“It was awesome!” Drogo says. “Next time you should come with! You’d really like it, I bet.”

“I mean, I’ve been there.”

“Oh seriously?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Once before, a couple years ago. I went with Dr. Tarly and Daario — so Dr. Tarly could decide if Grey was stable enough to come back to work.” She pauses. “It’s a very pretty place.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	50. Missy is the victim of a man, AGAIN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey does some soul-searching at home, finds that it's really hard to be a prodigal son. Missy visits jail, sees a baby, and also masturbates. And that's not all she does this episode! She also is a complete badass at work, but all her victim-blaming colleagues see is someone who is constantly in peril, aw. The love of her life finally shows his face at the end of the episode, so maybe this means that they will finally get screen time together after a billion eps of no screen time together!

  
  


  
  
  


He actually didn’t need Drogo’s lecture. He made the decision to go back to work before his plane even landed in the Isles. He made the decision even before he listened to his parents bicker for hours on a plane as his mom took the really bizarre, hard-line stance against allowing students to bring in baked goods during namedays because there are just too many allergies these days and she can’t keep up with it because she’s old. 

He has just been trying to muster up the guts to like,  _ tell  _ his parents that he’s a moron who keeps wanting to go back to an abusive relationship. 

He’s been spending his days alternating between getting sunshine, half-heartedly trying to work out, and visiting some of his old haunts. 

He goes to the grocery store that he used to work at and finds that his manager is still there for instance. He finds the responses from his old friends to be predictable now that everyone knows about his imprisonment — some people are awed and a little awkward about him now — others are hellbent on pretending everything is the same. 

He goes out for drinks with them — tagging along to their monthly ritual because they enthusiastically invited him. He eats steamed fish and drinks a beer at a plastic table quietly, because he has been cut off from their lives so he doesn’t have any context for all of their ongoing stuff like Ceci’s youngest boy’s problems in school or Banton’s new house’s plumbing problems. 

His aunties and uncles start dropping by his parents' house uninvited despite his parents’ assurances that he won’t be bombarded. He starts to feel bad for showing up ‘late’ to the festivities even though they are entirely unplanned and often inconvenient. He does more of the same there — he spends some time telling his relatives what he can tell them about he went through — he just answers their questions. Then, they problem-solve for him and tell him that he should get a new job. He generally avoids looking into his parents’ faces. He doesn’t want to see their guilt. Or their hopefulness.

He feels unintentionally ostracized among his cousins, many of whom have multiple children by now. After the topic of his imprisonment is exhausted, there is little that they can talk to each other about with ease. He is worried about coming off like an elitist, pretentious Western snob — so he keeps quiet for the most part. He struggles to look and feel engaged, as his cousins talk about their kids’ behavioral issues at school or their kid’s athletic and academic accomplishments. Perhaps influenced by his parents and also what has happened to him and his body, his cousins cautiously say that they are unsure if they should send their children overseas for university. The cost of an overseas education is much more exorbitant now. The school systems in the Isles are improving. Maybe it’s better to keep the children at home? 

Their eyes search his for insight. And he cannot say much because he’s only known what he has known. He only mildly repeats what they have told him, that yes, it is expensive. And maybe yes, it is better to keep them at home. 

  
  
  
  
  


Missy watches as Yiantha tearfully rocks her baby in her arms. A lot has changed since the last time she was able to visit her friend-informant. Yiantha has been sentenced, for instance, and it will be many years before Yiantha will be released. 

Naturally, Yiantha’s primary concern is losing her baby, a person that she has completely fallen in love with and cannot conceive of living without. Missandei has figured out that Yiantha thinks that she has some influence and can help ensure that mother and baby stay together for as long as possible.

Missandei certainly does not wield this power at all. She only knows what she’s been told, which is that they want to keep mother and baby together during the most vulnerable stage of the baby’s life. She also knows another thing: Prisons are terrible places for babies. Prisons are not staffed or equipped to nurture babies.

“I can home-school her when she gets older,” Yiantha says, holding her baby close to her chest, negotiating.

Missy doesn’t have the heart to correct this misinformation. She just feels  _ exhausted _ by life in general. 

So she says, “Maybe.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He actually proactively reaches out to her because she was legit his friend back when he was living here. 

He finds that a lot of things have changed — her personal style, her hair, her confidence in herself and her sexuality — and a lot of things have stayed the same. 

Like, there is still enough of an age difference between them that it sort of feels generational. She is constantly on her phone and laughing over the ladies who have been sliding into her DMs — as he is trying to have a conversation with her. They still only manage to talk about him for about half an hour before the topic switches over to her. She assumes that he wants to know everything that has happened to her since they have been apart.

She tells him about her brief disownment by her parents once they found out she’s gay. She tells him how it was a really depressing time in her life. She tells him that the turnaround and acceptance happened because the gods spoke to her mother and told her mother that Tiani’s predilection is a test for her parents’ grace and ability to tolerate.

Grey is like, “That’s a little — that’s a little —” He is fighting for the right word. 

“Yeah!” Tiani says. “I’m glad the gods made them see that I’m not an abomination!”

After a beat, Grey says, “Oh. So we’re actually happy with this. Okay. I will switch my talking points.” And then, after another brief pause, he wonders out loud, “Why is our culture so obsessed with disownment and excommunication? Why is conformity so important to us?”

She is already over it. She is smacking her lips against the taste of the chocolate mocha she is drinking. She is saying, “I’m going to a party at a friend’s house later. You wanna come? I wanna introduce you to people as my ex-boyfriend. It will make them trip!”

“Nah,” Grey says, already feeling exhausted. “I’m good. Thanks though.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She has the house to herself — during the daytime. This rare moment of solitude exists because her dad went to Kaden’s soccer game and she isn’t working this weekend. 

She ends up being so bored out of her fucking mind about five minutes into her alone time — which, ironically, was the thing she was afraid of, if she had gone to Kaden’s soccer game. 

She ends up trying to organize her nail polish by color for a few minutes, before deciding that the menial task is pointless and worthless. She tries to do some reading on the couch, but she cannot focus on the words. She tries to have a beer by herself because maybe she is this person now? 

She dumps the rest of the bottle down the drain and consoles herself with the fact that she probably will never become an alcoholic.

She scrolls through her phone and goes on social media to see what her friends are all up to. It’s a lot of stuff with their kids and some vacation photos. She likes a bunch of photos awkwardly and just thinks about how she is so bad at social media because she is so out of touch. She doesn’t even know if she is liking things correctly.

She thinks about how, in the relatively brief period that they dated, they never even took one photo together. She has no shred of evidence at all, that they were ever a thing. 

For a freak moment, she actually hysterically wonders if maybe she made it up — if she made up an entire relationship because she is so pathetic and lonely.

She unlocks her safe and bypasses her other gun in her reach for her vibrator. She scrutinizes it, and kind of dusts it off. She washes it, just to be safe.

Then she plops onto her bed, on her back, with her wet vibrator in hand. In preparation for an orgasm, she tells herself that she’s probably going to be alone forever. She’s probably going to die alone. She will probably never know the touch of a man ever again.

Then she pushes down her shorts and underwear.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He buys and then brings curried goat buns to the meeting and sets them on the table in the community center room with a stack of fluffy napkins. There are a few new men in the group, so they look at him — sizing him up with a touch of wariness, because he is so young compared to the rest of them —  but they mostly look at him with benign curiosity. 

He’s been holding out his hand for a lot of handshakes. 

He gets his entire body crushed in a strong hug when Uncle Matun arrives — sees him — looks confused for a moment — and then brightens way up in excitement and elation. Matun shouts, “Nudho!” right into his ear as he embraces Grey. “You didn’t tell me you were coming! We would’ve done something special for you.”

“That’s why I didn’t tell you I was stopping by,” Grey admits, returning the hug.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“One hundred for a blow job,” she says, crossing her arms over her breasts, cocking her hip to the side. And before he can protest, she says, “Yes, it costs that much. I need to eat, you know?”

“Hey, you can eat my cock all you want, sweetheart,” he easily returns.

Oh, shit. A live one. And  _ gross.  _

Just for fun because it’s important to find joy in the little things, Missandei adds, “And with a condom. I insist on this.”

In her ear, she can hear Daario say, “What the fuck? You had him already!”

“Uh, no condom,” the john returns. He is a white guy who looks like middle management. He looks like he is cheating on his wife of five years right now. He also sounds like he is a wizened and experienced buyer of sex. 

“Sorry, honey,” she says. “Condom or I walk. Safe sex is important, you know? My safety and health is important, you know?”

There is a glint in his eye because, naturally, he is completely missing her bitter point. “I see,” he says. “You want more money. Okay, I’ll bite, sweetheart. How much more for no condom?”

She is pretty sick of men letting her down in a myriad of small and large ways. She is pretty sick of her brothers and dad being scared about her emotional state just because a couple of lunatics tried to gun her down and the person she loves is just fucking ghosting her hardcore — but she’d have to be a real bitch to get on his ass for that because he  _ did  _ go through months of torture and imprisonment. 

She is coping remarkably well, all things considered. 

So she says, “Double.”

“Two hundred for a  _ blow job?” _

“Yes. And you need to stop acting like I’m over-charging. Go to one of the other girls if you want a discount on your BJ then.”

The quality in his eye changes — there is a touch of exhilaration in his expression now. And she realizes that she has misread him and that he is actually far more dangerous than she previously estimated. 

“How much for me to do anything to you — for half an hour?” he asks her.

“One thousand,” she says steadily.

His expression hardens. “So you are one of the classy ones, huh?” he says to her.

“Yes,” she says.

  
  
  
  
  
  


As he listens to the men in group talk about their own trauma related to manhood and masculinity — the focus of group has broadened somewhat in the time that Grey’s been away — as Grey listens to a man he doesn’t know display an insane amount of vulnerability by telling them about the sexual abuse he suffered for years as a boy by a male adult relative — Grey feels like a complete scumbag. He feels like an asshole for previously using group as a tool to prove his mental health. He feels like a sociopath for the ease in which he lied through his teeth, didn’t take any of this seriously, and even felt a touch of superiority for being so much more efficient at handling the loss of his dick compared to the men in group.

He feels like he is continuing to do a terrible thing, just by being here today — just for stopping by to be a spectator in their pain and their bonding. He feels stupid for being a minor celebrity, just because Matun is fond of him and is vouching for him to these men who look at him like he is stranger to them. They must be thinking that they didn’t expect to have to spill their guts in front of a stranger today.

In the Summer Tongue, during a lull, Matun asks if there is anyone else who’d like to share something. 

In his infinite awkwardness when he being authentic, Grey raises his hand like he is back in school and Matun is his teacher — and he feels immediately embarrassed by that.

He has half of a goat bun in his hand, which he has to get rid of before he talks otherwise he will have to hold it the whole time — he has planned this out a little stupidly — so he crams the bun into his mouth and vigorously and nervously chews as a bunch of eyes indulgently and kindly watch him ready himself.

As he swallows the wad of bun and meat down, he tries to lay down some context in order for his story to make sense. He starts to talk about the last year — before he realizes right away that he is being presumptuous and that he probably has to go back farther than that, because a lot of these men don’t follow his life avidly.

So he apologizes and then goes back even farther — as a man he doesn’t know but has met encouragingly tells him that it’s okay — and to take the time that he needs to collect his thoughts.

In the Summer Tongue — and Grey wishes he could actually speak in the Common Tongue because at this point, his emotional vocabulary is more nuanced and complex in the Common Tongue but he doesn’t want to be  _ that kind _ of douchebag and force them to fight to understand him because of language — he tells them that there’s a lot he cannot tell them because of security reasons. He works for a Westerosi government entity and he can’t talk about what he does in detail because the information is classified.

But his job is dangerous, and he has been attacked and tortured in the course of his work. 

Grey gestures to the front of his pants — vaguely to his pelvis — and he tells them that he’s been mutilated. While it’s terrible to articulate it in such a clunky way because of his language limitations, he thinks it’s important to voice this because he just spent twenty minutes listening to a man he doesn’t know spill out his entire fucking guts. Grey is kind of tired of being a dead-inside taker. 

He tells them this one terrible act changed his entire life and who he is. He can’t sleep sometimes. He is having trouble eating. He sometimes misses it — a lot. He sometimes feels like it’s still there, and then he is so sad and angry when he realizes that he had been dreaming. He thinks that it has come to represent normalcy and peace to him — and that is forever out of his reach. 

And they don’t care. 

He tells group that  _ they —  _ those who allowed this to happen to him — don’t care. They don’t care at all. He has been telling himself that their apathy doesn’t matter to him because fuck them — but he can’t eat and he can’t sleep and he can’t have any peace in his head and he can’t have or accept intimacy from anyone — and so he must be lying to himself and he must care at least a little bit — about their apathy over what has happened to him.  

  
  
  
  
  
  


There is a delay between when she signals them and when they arrive. And it’s enough for the john to become incensed once he realizes she has betrayed him. Usually, delays aren’t the end of the world because johns typically are just sad and lonely guys who want sex. 

This one, though, is  _ a sick asshole. _

His hands go for her throat so that he can hold her down and smack her in the face for what she has done to him.

She has to knee him right in the groin and break his nose to get him to stop trying to choke her out. 

Her top is ripped and her boob escaped her bra in the entire mess of this — when Robb and Gendry bust into the room with their guns.

She is breathing hard from adrenaline and doesn’t realize her tit is out — not until Robb kindly leads her to a private corner so that she can gather her bearings and cover herself up again. Her hand goes to her bra cup as she looks at Robb’s refusal to look back at her. 

As Gendry arrests the john, Robb quietly apologizes for not being quicker to back her up, for letting this shitshow happen. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


“What size does Drogo wear in shirts? Is it a large?” his mom asks him, from her low position in the living room. She’s surrounded by stacks of laundry that she is continuously adding to. 

“Don’t buy him anything,” Grey warns, knowing that Drogo is picky about his clothes. “He won’t wear it.”

“He will,” his mom says sensibly. “If he knows I got it just for him.”

“I’m going back,” Grey blurts suddenly, catching his dad lowering his book in his peripheral vision. “Back to work, I mean. I’m so sorry, guys. I know it’s completely stupid. I know I should stay here instead — with you. But . . . I’m going back.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


His parents are so afraid of losing him again that they put on cheerful faces and try to brush the entire matter under the rug. His mom’s voice goes into falsetto as she tells him  _ of course _ he’s going back. They all know that. This isn’t a surprise that warrants a discussion and announcement at all. They know he loves his job and feels that it is rewarding. They are very proud of him. 

“My job is not rewarding at all,” Grey says baldly, as he stares into his mom’s face, as he watches it flicker and break the littlest bit. He watches her tear up for just a moment before she blanks out. 

He senses his dad’s inner tension — his dad’s energy applied toward biting back his tongue in order to keep the peace.

“My job is shitty,” Grey tells the both of them, as they cut eye contact with them. “I work long hours doing dangerous work that might end up killing me — under the direction of people who don’t give one shit about me.”

His mom starts to cry at that. And his dad is quietly asking, “Why, Nudho? What is the point you are trying to make here?”

“I’m really  _ good  _ at my shitty job,” Grey says, answering the question. “And I don’t mean I’m really good at killing people — not anymore at least. I mean I’m really good at keeping people alive. I’m good at keeping people safe. And I _ know  _ that what I am doing makes a positive difference — even if it’s just a tiny, little fraction of a difference. And if I can do that for people, then I have to keep doing my job. Because if it’s not me doing my job, then it will be someone else who isn’t as good as I am. And then people could get really hurt, you know? I would rather be the one who hurts, you know?”

“Nudho,” his dad cuts in — and then just stops, blinking in a daze behind his reading glasses. “I actually don’t know what to say right now.”

“You can do that work  _ here,”  _ his mom says, wiping her eyes. “Our government needs talented people like you, too. Why do you need to work for  _ them? _ ”

His eyes soften as he looks at her — and so does his voice — because he knows that this is not going to devolve into a fight and disownment again. He tells her, “I wish you could see the kinds of people I work with. I think, then, you’d understand why.” And then, with a little lightness, he shrugs. He kind of jokingly adds, “Maybe if I survive another decade or two, I’ll retire here. I’ll come back and work here.”

“We’ll be dead by that time,” his mom says darkly.

“Sanaa,” his dad says patiently. “You don’t think we’re going to live to see sixty-five or seventy?”

“I’m older than you!” his mom snaps, turning to face her husband.

“Yes,” his dad says steadily — smirking indulgently at her with his eyes. “You are.”

“Stop!”

“I know you both want me to stay safe,” Grey continues, trying to circumvent the fight his parents are about to have with each other. “Anyway, your wish might come true. I might be very safe soon enough. I’ve been worried that my brain is completely fucked up. I might be entirely too mentally broken to do my job anymore. I might get posted at a desk and my greatest threat there might be papercuts. But that’s okay, I guess. I can still make an impact there. That’s a nice middle ground, right? I’ll let you guys know either way.”

“Your brain is fine!” his mom shouts at him — still all amped and ready for a brawl. “Don’t say that about yourself! If you say you are crazy too much — people will believe you! And then they put you in an insane asylum! It happened to your grandma!”

“She had postpartum depression,” his dad effortlessly explains.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Instead of engaging her in a discussion about the perils of toxic masculinity and the precarious position women are constantly in because men can’t handle not getting everything they want — Drogo pulls her into his office the next day to talk about the mistakes that she made that resulted in her getting assaulted by an asshole.

She completely expects this, so she is pretty chill about it. She doesn’t cower or tear up or shake like a leaf. She just leans back in her chair and listen as Drogo rattles off the contents of the report — which she knows because she wrote it, duh. 

Drogo says, “Daario said you had him, but you detoured and asked him about condoms?”

“I’ve been really alarmed at how all of these poor women doing sex work have to put themselves at risk just because pornography teaches us that condoms are gross,” she casually tells him.

“Do you think this is funny?” Drogo says, his eyes narrowing. “Is your job a joke to you now?”

She tells him no, obviously this isn’t funny and no, her job isn’t a joke to her at all. She asks him why there was a delay on Daario’s end — even though she knows it was an equipment malfunction. They need to upgrade their equipment, but there are budget constraints. But no big deal, she’ll just die so the organization doesn’t have to bear the spend. 

“Okay, so maybe it’s a little bit funny,” she tells Drogo, leaning in toward him a little bit. 

He is so fucking over this, and he completely hates her newfound confidence in herself and her utter calmness and lack of fear of him. That much is clear to her. 

She bets he still wishes she was held in Valyria and not Grey. But that’s cool. She wishes the same thing.

“So, it’s all in the report. Are we done here?” 

He is so unhappy — and she actually finds some joy in this. He is sighing heavily, as he says to her, “You need to get cleared by psych to go back into the field, today. Can you do it before end-of-day so that we can put you on the schedule for Monday?”

“Totally,” Missandei says. “I’ll make an appointment right away.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


At the airport, his mom lays about a billion kisses on his face, catching him on  _ the mouth _ sometimes, which is actually not that weird in their culture, but he’s so Westernized now that it makes him uncomfortable. He mutters that he doesn’t want to make out with his own mother — to her — and she slaps him across the face for that, telling him to stop saying perverted things to his own mother. 

His dad also gives him a kiss on the cheek and holds onto his head during a tight hug. 

They both make him promise to Skype them once every day. And he thinks that’s fucking insane, and he  _ will not _ do that. He negotiates and offers to Skype once a week. 

They balk at that — at how Westernized he is now — like, he hates his own parents now! 

There are cars honking their horns at them because they are taking up two entire drop-off lanes with this bullshit because his dad parked like a fucking  _ asshole _ . His parents are deaf to the honking and just want to have their emotional send-off of him to the fullest extent. Grey keeps trying to rip himself away from them so that other people can say goodbye to their loved ones, but their grip on him is very strong.

“You are my heart outside of my body, baby,” his mom mutters, holding onto him. “Take good care of my heart, okay?”

He groans. Because it’s so sappy and disgustingly gross. He sighs. He says, “Mom — yeah, sure. Okay.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She sees that he’s back because the calendar says that he’s back. The meeting invite has his name on it, and he has confirmed his attendance.

For this reason — and she completely  _ hates herself for doing this and for caring so much omg —  _ she takes extra care in dressing herself in the morning. She takes extra care in applying her makeup. She takes extra care on her curls, making sure they are full of moisture and definition — as if he even gives one shit about her hair.

  
  
  
  
  
  


On his first day back officially, he spends the morning checking his email — and holy fuck he has  _ so many  _ unread emails. It is also impossible to get any long stretch of time to get through the pile because people keep stopping by his desk to congratulate him for still being alive. 

Alayaya steals minutes from his life by perching on the corner of his desk and running her hands all over the parts of him that are exposed to her — so his entire head, his shoulders, arms, and chest. She comes across very Islander-y in this way. He keeps trying to shrink away from her touch because he doesn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about them. 

She tells him that he looks  _ so good _ since the last time she saw him. She runs her nails over his newly shaved scalp. She tells him that he looks like he is no longer bleeding at all! He looks amazing! 

Right before staff meeting starts at nine o’clock, Drogo snaps his foot and kicks Grey’s chair, jolting him in surprise. 

Drogo says, “You need to call your mother! She’s been texting me and asking me all about your sleeping habits and whether or not you are eating five meals a day — because you are ignoring her messages?”

He actually hasn’t been ignoring her messages. He’s been answering them and talking to her. He just sometimes waits a few hours because he is trying to teach her that she needs to  _ calm the fuck down  _ and let him  _ breathe  _ sometimes goddamn _. _

“Grey, guess what day it is!” Gendry asks excitedly.

“Uh —”

Gendry answers for him. “It’s Tuesday, man! Your favorite! Taco Tuesday!”

His eyes snap right to hers at that — because he remembers that she might be the only person in the world who knows how much he actually hates Taco Tuesday. 

She looks surprised that his gaze on her is so direct. And then after the initial shock wears off, she gives him a small, encouraging smile.

“Oh, right,” he says absently, as his face goes hot. “Taco Tuesday.”

  
  
  
  
  
  



	51. Missy doesn't buy Grey a drink

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this ep, Missy and Dany hang out and it's really natural and not weird at all. Grey's mommy is still really intrusive, but from afar this time. Upon seeing Grey, Stannis is like, "Oh, do I know you?" And FINALLYYYY our boos finally connect with each other (not that way, pervs) after months of being apart.

  
  
  


 

 

Grey randomly sees Stannis down the hallway on his first day back and gives Stannis a wave and a small smile. 

Stannis looks completely perturbed for a split second, before his eyes narrow, before recognition very mildly blooms across his expression. Stannis gives Grey a short nod, somewhat apologetically, before he ducks into a conference room for a meeting. 

The interaction is about as meaningful as all of his interactions with Stannis, so Grey is actually grateful that some things just don’t change. 

Grey walks past familiar rows and rows of cubicles, on top of charcoal carpeting. He shivers a little bit as he walks underneath a draft and past the copiers. He’s still acclimatizing from the Summer Isles sun to an overly air-conditioned office building. 

Before he knocks on the door, he thinks about the place that he was in a year ago versus now. A year ago, this was a means to an end, and he had this tunnel vision pointed out at a singular goal — which was to get back to normal as fast as humanly possible. A year ago, his concept of normal was getting back to the routine of work, proving that he still had it. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


“You’ve really missed me, huh?” Grey says lightly, because Sam is a little flushed and embarrassed about the hug — after they let go of each other. “Well, you know why I’m here, doc,” he continues. “I need to be cleared to go back into the field by you —”

“Grey,” Sam says, the corners of his mouth dipping into a frown. 

Sam has been obsessing over his own errors in judgement, his own mistakes. Sam is already thinking that it’s maybe too soon, and he should be far more careful and protective of Grey, this time around.

“Okay, well, let’s see if I remember how this works,” Grey says breezily, taking a few steps toward the leather couch before dropping down onto it in a lump. He crosses his legs and then leans back in a slouch.

“Grey —”

“Doc, do you think I’m crazy?” 

And then Grey smiles — more to himself than to Sam. Because the deja vu is just so strong right now — and maybe this time, he will finally learn to make better decisions. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Dany has more free time now — because her super demotion comes with a lot fewer responsibilities and actually only a little bit less money. When asked about her humiliating demotion, Dany tells people the watered down version of how she is coping. She tells people that she is a failure and has nothing left to live for anymore — and then she walks away as they start to sputter out their reassurances.

In truth, her reality feels far more bleak. She’s been examining her life, and she feels too old to start over, so she might as well just fucking end it all because there is no point in any of it ever again. Her brother keeps giving her shit advice like, “Have a baby to fulfill that hole in your heart!” as he simultaneously gains so much happiness and glee from her recent misfortunes. 

Daario has been trying to talk to her. She is pathologically avoidant when it comes to these things, so she doesn’t have anything left to say to him. She has been blowing him off. He tells her it’s been extremely hurtful. She can’t even make herself care.

She sometimes feels this terrible regret. She sometimes thinks that maybe she should’ve let Grey die in Valyria. She’d still have her job, then.

And because her life is fucking empty and she has nothing fucking to live for — because she has so much fucking free time — she goes to Missandei’s house to continue trying to make amends because there is no one left in Dany’s fucking life that she gives a shit about except for Missandei. Dany needs to make up with Missandei so that she doesn’t have to go out and make a new friend using her really shitty and unlikeable personality.  

She arrives at Missandei’s house with a plant — a green one — at their pre-decided time and gives the plant to Missandei’s father, who is very polite about it. 

He tells her that Missandei is in the backyard, so Dany walks out there and then starts the most fucking awkward bit of small talk ever. She awkwardly gestures to the garden that Missandei and her dad grow together — an activity that Dany finds a little bizarre because she doesn’t have a father to do activities with. Dany points to a leafy plant and tells Missandei, “Cool plant.” 

“My dad’s a really good gardener,” Missy says, gesturing at a leaf like it’s the best leaf out of all of the leaves. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Everyone currently wants a piece of him, and it is  _ exhausting. _ This is why he consolidates everyone together and makes it clear that he’s not currently about one-on-ones. They can come to him at a bar after work and talk to him there for a little bit before he gets tired of being social and goes home to chill with his favorite person: himself.

He keeps his eye on the door — kind of-sort of looking for her. He doesn’t know how she would  _ know _ about impromptu happy hour, but maybe she heard it through the grapevine.

She never shows up. Which he supposes that he deserves, for how he has pushed and delayed this out.

Instead, he sits in a hard booth, picks at a plate of nachos, feels bored, and listens to Drogo, Bronn, and Alayaya bitch about work and leadership for  _ hours. _ He finds that now that the urgency of death has subsided, it has reverted to much of the same silly shit. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


It’s not that Dany doesn’t feel terrible and rotten inside for all of her errors in judgement and all of the times she was shitty in articulating things that it hurt Missandei’s feelings. She  _ does _ feel really bad for the way that she made Missandei feel — with her secret-keeping, with how she spoke about Grey, with how much she sucks at being a human person that other people find pleasant to be around. 

It’s really that Dany doesn’t know how to say sorry — she was never taught. It always feels empty and meaningless — the words, “I’m sorry.” She was never apologized to. She kind of believes that what she has done is so egregious that she doesn’t deserve forgiveness, so she shouldn’t further insult Missandei by soliciting it. 

On Missy’s end, she doesn’t know how to say she forgives — she doesn’t know how to tell Dany this without first hearing the apology. It seems presumptuous and bold to just forgive out of thin air. 

She understands Dany has had a hard couple of years. She understands that Dany  _ does _ care — and that sometimes people forget that Dany cares because Dany is so strong. She understands that Dany gave up  _ so much _ for Grey. 

Missandei is sorry, too. She has certain regrets, also. 

So instead of saying anything meaningful to her best friend — maybe her only friend — maybe the only person in Dany’s life she has ever loved in a non-complicated way, Dany says, “Are there two different kinds of grass here? Why is this patch  _ so green?” _

“I don’t know,” Missy says, looking down at the patch of grass in question. “I can ask my dad?”

“No, don’t trouble him. I can live with not knowing.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


It’s just the two of them left. 

Drogo is reluctant to let Grey be alone, despite Grey’s reassurances that he is interested in being alone. Drogo has taken the statements in stride, saying, “Alright, no prob,” before raising up his hand to order another beer. 

Grey thinks that it’s because Drogo thinks he is fragile right now. Grey thinks that everyone in his life just hysterically thinks he is so weak.

Drogo actually just has this feeling of abstract nervousness that he doesn’t understand. He can’t put his finger on the pulse of it. It’s not like he reasonably thinks that Grey is going to get hit by a car and die if Drogo takes his eyes off of the guy for a second. 

In a lull, Grey’s phone buzzes, prompting him to pick it up to look at the text message. 

He sighs, rolls his eyes, and then sets the phone back down.

“What?” Drogo asks.

“My mom,” Grey explains.

And then before Drogo can get another word in edgewise, Grey’s phone starts ringing.  

  
  
  
  
  
  


In the days that ensue, she sees him in team meetings and they both keep acting like this is their lives and everything is normal again. He even directs a benign question to her about asset management during a meeting, which was so unexpected and surprising that it took her a few seconds to even realize he was talking to her. 

After looking appropriately stunned — which makes Gendry sneak out a laugh — she answers Grey’s question in a few words, to his apparent satisfaction because he has no follow-up questions and moves on quickly after that.

On Thursday, she has to squeeze by him as he is talking to Sandor, in order to get to Drogo’s office. She quickly touches her hand to the back of his shoulder to signal to him that she’s there — so that she can quickly and quietly slip through between him and the wall and not creep him out in the process.

She feels him glance at her from over his shoulder, but otherwise he doesn’t say anything. Her heart just pounds, and she feels like she’s transported back to high school — both in how hopelessly uncool she feels and how flustered a boy makes her. 

Her face is hot when she opens Drogo’s door. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


She has the night off on Friday, not scheduled to cram her body into tight clothes in order to entice lonely men into wanting to have sex with her — so her hot plans include squeezing in a quick workout before she runs home to her dad, in time to watch a bunch of adorable, pint-sized wannabe chefs who haven’t yet hit puberty compete culinarily against each other and cry when their souffle collapses. She likes the show because of the crying kids. Her dad likes it because of its family-friendly format and the cooking.

She freezes in her tracks when she realizes who is the source of the repetitive thump-thump-thump on one of the treadmills. 

They make direct eye contact through the mirror.

“Hey,” he says breathlessly.

His face is wet and shiny from sweat. His legs are kind of a blur to her. 

So she tries to play it cool. She ducks her gaze down to the thin towel and water bottle in her hand. She tries to razz him, with “Cardio, Grey?” but it sounds a touch too shy.

Still, it makes him break out into a near-silent, really brief laugh. His hand reaches out to touch the handle bar as he grins. He is looking at her like their last words to each other wasn’t her urging him to let her just die with him so that he doesn’t have to die alone, like his last words to her wasn’t him confessing to her that she made him happy and that he wanted her to figure out a way to live the rest of her life happy without him.

The way he is looking at her makes her heart completely seized in her chest because  _ this _ feels so familiar and it must mean that he is  _ really back  _ and this isn’t her imagination _. _

He looks sheepish, as he starts punching at buttons on the treadmill, as the machine starts whirring as it lowers itself, as it slows down, as he says, “Yeah, I need to build up some endurance. My muscles are complete shit. I get winded walking up a flight of stairs. Like — it’s not good, man.”

“So you’re coming back into the field,” she comments lightly. “That’s part of why you are working out?”

His voice lilts up, as does his face. He says, “Well, it’s just good for my health to work out?”

She feels embarrassed already — like she has already said something wrong. She quickly says, “Oh, of course. I didn’t mean — I phrased it weird. I meant to ask — are you planning on coming back into the field?”

“I think I am,” he tells her, coming to a full stop now. He grabs his water bottle before he flips himself around so that they don’t have to keep talking through the mirror.

Once confronted with his real, raw face again, she blushes. “Cool,” she says. “It’ll be good to work together again.”

“Yeah, for sure,” he says, as he uncaps his bottle and takes a few gulping sips from it. And then, reaching blindly behind him, he puts his bottle of water back into the cupholder. He is casual and looks thoughtful, as he plainly says to her, “We’re kind of overdue for a talk, right?”

There is a pause as her body breaks out in a little bit of anxiety — it feels like she was just called out or something, even though she knows she was not. It feels vulnerable — like he knows that she has been thinking about him a lot. 

“Um, maybe a little,” she says, twisting her body on her toes a little bit, maybe trying to hide it from his line of sight. “I mean, I’m not like, keeping track or anything.”

And then she cracks another shy smile at him — which he kindly returns.

Quietly, he asks, “Do you want to . . . grab some coffee, maybe?”

And very gently and carefully — because she doesn’t want him to know she is  _ freaking out  _ on the inside — she says, “Um, sure. That sounds nice. When would be a good time for you?”

“Are you free after work?”

She bites down on her bottom lip. “You mean tonight?”

“Is that not good?”

“No no!” she says quickly, not wanting to blow this. “It’s just, coffee shops usually close early.”

“Oh . . . good point.”

“Do you maybe . . . want to do dinner instead? I mean, no pressure. We can also like, look up a cafe that is open late.”

He nods. “Oh, okay. Sure. I’m not really hungry though — but you know — I just don’t get hungry anymore. When are you off today?”

“Um, I’m actually off right now,” she says, as she shifts a little bit back and forth on her feet, all of a sudden self-conscious that she is making this poor guy eat when he doesn’t want to. “Um, I can go change? Since you’re not hungry, we can probably hit up a coffee shop before closing time if we go right now?”

“Oh no,” he says, frowning now. “You wanted to work out, though?”

“It’s not a big deal,” she says, waving her hand at him. “I can work out later.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She discreetly calls her dad in the women’s restroom to tell him she can’t make it home to watch their show with him tonight, whispering with her hand covering the microphone, to reduce the echo. 

Having worked in law enforcement for decades, her dad immediately understands that something weird is going on and she’s trying to hide something from him. This is why he directly asks her if she is safe and if everything is truly fine. 

In a bathroom stall, with her elbows on her knees and her body squished up tightly, she whispers to her dad that Grey asked her out to coffee. And she can’t say, 'No, I can’t because I already have a date with my dad. Because I'm a pathetic loser.'

She doesn’t say the last part out loud. She just thinks it.

And her dad immediately understands and immediately lets out a sigh of relief. He even laughs at her and tells her that she’s been silly, and it’s fine. Go out and have a nice time with Grey. They both really deserve it.

  
  
  
  
  
  


They end up at a boba place that she looked up on her phone because it’s a cafe that is open in the evening. 

When they walk into the establishment, she immediately regrets picking the place because she and Grey are completely the wrong demographic for this place. She doesn’t even mean racially. She actually means they are old as hell and this place seems to be solely inhabited by too-cool suburban high schoolers. 

After she panic-orders a really safe flavor — strawberry — and he shows her up by calmly ordering a super weird flavor — salty cheese — she awkwardly pays for her drink and her drink only, which causes him confusion because he tries to walk away from the register only to be called back by the cashier and told that his drink wasn’t paid by his friend so he has to pay.

She apologizes for that as they stand side-by-side, waiting for their drinks. She says, “Sorry. I should’ve paid for yours.”

“Nah,” he says. “I shouldn’t have assumed I was gonna get a free drink outta you.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She easily banishes all of the terrible things that have happened to them to the far corner of her mind, for the time being. 

Instead, she just thinks about how crazy it is, the trajectory that life takes on its own. She has known him for a long time, for instance. She hadn’t known years ago that she would feel this way about him  _ today. _ She didn’t realize that a person could stir up this kind of steadiness and this kind of quiet confidence in love, for instance. She thought that she’d be a little greedy and selfish in love — because that’s how she loves and misses her mother. She would pay a lot to get even just a little bit more time with her mother again. She would sacrifice deeply to be able to talk to her mother again. That kind of love is about coveting and acquisition. 

But she is very ready to let him go — if that’s what he wants and if that is what he needs from her. She feels okay with giving him up, if that is what is best for him. She is prepared for the pain of it — because she can bear pain if it means he is healthy and happier because of it. 

She suspects that she’s not going to like the outcome of this talk at all. She suspects that he’s about to tell her that they are officially over and that he’s been avoiding the shit out of her because he has been reluctant about breaking her heart. 

“How’s your cheese drink?” she asks.

And in response, he blurts, “I’m so sorry I’ve been avoiding you.”

“You’ve been avoiding me?” she asks rhetorically. And upon the changed expression on his face — she quickly says, “I’m joking. I have definitely noticed you’ve been avoiding me.”

“It wasn’t because I didn’t want to see you —”

“You weren’t ready to have a heavy conversation with me,” she finishes. “I know. It’s okay. I didn’t mind waiting.” Her smile is strained. She rotates her cold, plastic cup. “It’s funny,” she tells him, ignoring the explosion of youthful laughter the next table over. “I’ve been really looking forward to this — but now that it’s happening, I kind of don’t know what to say to you.”

“I know,” he says, looking down at his own straw and cup. “A lot has happened, and it’s like — where to start? What is most relevant?”

“Um, well, I’m so glad you’re still alive,” she offers. “Like, really, really glad.”

“Me too,” he says. "That you're alive, I mean. I mean, I'm glad I'm still alive, too. But I mostly meant, same to you." 

“Um,  _ thank you,” _ she says, totally not commenting on his  _adorable_ rambling. And after a short pause and his confused look, she says, “Grey, you saved my life.”

“Oh, well — don’t mention it?” He laughs self-consciously. 

She laughs, too. “It’s such an immense thing to say thank you to,” she says. “Um, I really wish I was better prepared for this. I should be. I should’ve written some things down, maybe. I mean, I’ve been planning this out in my head for  _ weeks _ now.”

“Planning what?” 

“What I was going to say to you when I saw you again,” she says. “What about you?”

“What about me?” he asks, leaving his cup on the table, leaning forward to sip from the massive straw. “You mean, what I was planning on saying to you after I saw you again?” he says around his straw.

“Yeah.”

A weight drops into his gut.  

So he lies — or he delays. He says, “Um, I just wanted you to be okay. I think I was gonna say something like, ‘Yay, you’re okay.’”

  
  


 

 


	52. Grey tries to end his relationship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this ep, Grey tries to break up with the future love of his life. The future love of his life is totally expecting to be broken up with. They have some tea, some banter, some reminiscing. And then some decisions get made!

  
  
  
  
  
  


He is pretty sure that if they had gotten close before his injury and before all of the other trauma that has happened to his body and his mind — they’d be together right now. It would be a complete no-brainer. He isn’t stupid, so he would've known that he is never going to do better than her — he is never going to find someone else who makes him feel the way that she does. He would've thrown himself all in, into the togetherness — into family obligations, into date nights, into work pep talks over meals, into vacations back to his parents’ home in the Summer Isles, into visits to where she comes from — they’d be doing all of it.

They’d also be having sex in a normal, non-tragic way. He would be able to give more of himself to her in sex. She wouldn’t always have to be accepting and always be conceding. He wouldn’t always be so distraught and upset.

He swallows the lump in his throat, tasting dairy, salt, and sugar. He looks at her face, at her immense and curious eyes looking back at him. It makes him think that in another life, it would be so easy for them. 

But they live in this life. And what has been made very abundantly clear to him is that he is really fucked up in the head and has a hard enough time feeding himself and sleeping these days. 

He already needs a break from the intensity of this — and they haven’t even  _ talked  _ about anything of substance yet. He just keeps second-thinking himself and his goals here. He just keeps thinking that he’s a fucking moron and that he’s about to make the biggest mistake of his entire life. He keeps thinking that he is going to end up regretting this forever — and it is really stressing him out.

In the midst of his internal panicking, she asks him, “Can I share something a little dumb and frivolous with you?”

Of course he agrees to this — “Of course,” he says, as his heart just throbs in his chest, as he looks at her smiling face. 

She tells him, “Sometimes I suddenly realize that I like, owe you a serious apology — but I keep overlooking it in light of the entirety of  _ everything _ that has happened.” She laughs kind of with bewilderment, as she reminds him, “I totally  _ shot you.  _ I feel so fucking terrible about that — that you were so hurt and so handicapped because of me — that you almost died because of me.”

He thinks that this isn’t a dumb and frivolous statement at all, what the fuck? 

“I  _ didn’t die _ because of _ you,”  _ he corrects. “I would’ve been shot in the face if it wasn’t for you.” He’s furrowing his brows. “You don’t have to apologize for shooting me. Thank God you did.”

“My aim wasn’t amazing.”

“I shouldn’t have been in the way of your bullet.”

“That sounds like something a battered woman would say. ‘I shouldn’t have made you hit me.’ Anyway, that was the first time I fired a gun on the job. And I hit you. Like, that’s crazy to me. It’s terrible — but it’s also kind of hilarious? Is that inappropriate?”

“Yes,” he says, smiling. “You are always a touch inappropriate.”

“How is your tummy?”

“About back to normal,” he says.

“Is there a scar?” she asks, frowning.

He shrugs. “Probably.” He says probably because he doesn’t like to look at himself long enough to examine himself.  

“Oh my God, this is  _ so nice,” _ she says, sighing kind of dreamily. “Being able to talk to you again. I used to talk to you all the time — in my head — when you were left in Valyria.”

Again, he thought that they were planning on having a dumb and frivolous conversation.

“Yeah?” he asks softly. “What did we talk about?”

“Shit, wildly depressing things,” she tells him, maintaining eye contact — enough for him to see that she is tearing up. “You were really mad at me sometimes, for leaving you behind —”

He cuts in. “You didn’t leave me behind —”

“I did though, didn’t I?” she corrects.

After a pause, he simply says, “I wanted you to leave me behind.”

“I didn’t expect you to try and absolve all of my guilt in this conversation,” she says to him, reaching up to brush her knuckles underneath her lashes.  “Good effort, Grey, but I don’t accept it. Do you want to keep things lighter? Do you want to talk about something else?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They both need a break from how easy it is for their conversation to get heavy and dark now. 

She lightens up their conversation by trash-talking Drogo — _ a lot. _ Her face is animated and glowing as she tells him that she knows he and Drogo are mega-tight, but Grey’s bff is also a huge  _ mega-asshole.  _ Like, does Grey know that Drogo is the biggest, pissiest asshole when he doesn’t get the  _ exact thing _ that he wants? Does Grey know that Drogo is so flagrant that there are stories floating around about how Drogo yelled at Dany in front of the entire office and then after she fired him, Drogo was like, ‘Fuck you, bitch. I ain’t fired.’ 

“That’s flagrant!” Missandei exclaims, her voice cracking a little. “I would  _ never  _ talk to my boss aka Drogo  _ that way!  _ If he fired me, I’d be like, ‘Oh shit, I guess I am fired now!’” She lightly slaps her palm to her own face. “Oh my God, is this conversation actually just revealing a lot of stuff about me and my pansy ass? Is this conversation not about Drogo at all? _ ” _

Grey is laughing — like, in an honest and real way that he completely did not expect to — like, for the first time in a  _ really long while  _ he is laughing as he readily nods. He gets them back on topic by telling her that he really  _ does _ know that Drogo is the pissiest asshole around. He tells her, “Quaithe used to also have a really hard time with Drogo — and Quaithe basically got along with everyone because she’s a real team player and works really hard.”

“Drogo hates women,” Missandei says in a stage whisper. “He’s  _ sexist.” _

“He’s harder on his female colleagues,” Grey clarifies.

Missy gives him an unimpressed look. “That’s  _ sexism, _ man!”

“Nah,” Grey drawls. “He just thinks women are more delicate and are in need of extra coaching and consideration and protection.”

“Grey!  _ That’s sexism!”  _ she urges. She cannot believe he doesn't know what sexism is!

And then she realizes that he is  _ totally fucking with her. _

She sees that glimmer in his eyes — that glint. 

“Oh my God,” she says, pressing her hand to her pulsating heart. “You are getting me all worked up _ on purpose! _ Here I was thinking that I had to teach you a little bit about sexism and then lose a smidgen of respect for you afterward — but turns out you are just punking me!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


The rest of their too-short cafe hangout feels so perfect to her. There is banter. There is teasing. There is his smile just fucking eclipsing everything around them. She can’t even hear the chatter of the kids around them anymore. 

The smoothness in being back in each other’s presence only affirms to her what she wants. She just wants to be able to be in love with this guy out in the open. She just wants for him to know. She just wants to not have to labor under hiding it and pretending like it’s shameful when it doesn’t feel shameful at all. It just feels right. 

She just wants to be able to shake him and scream at him and ask him if he even fucking understands how grateful she is that he is alive and safe and in her reach again. She will never fucking want for or ask for another thing ever from him, because what she has gotten back is more than she has ever expected for herself. 

She feels like she’s in pain as she follows him back to her car — they drove together and left his car at work. She watches him wait expectantly for her to unlock the passenger door. She is tempted to blurt out her secret right then. 

And then, in her car — in the parking garage at work — she realizes that this is actually the first bit of time they’ve had alone together in _ months —  _ like, alone-alone. Like, there is nobody getting drinks around them _. _

After she shuts off her car, she hears him ready himself with a soft sigh. She knows it’s coming — and it’s okay.

She still goes for it, though — just one last time. He got to force a goodbye kiss on her — so she must be allotted one herself. 

She just shuts her eyes and then blindly leans forward to press her mouth softly against his. She kisses him chastely. It feels _ amazing. _ She runs her nose against his cheek. That feels  _ amazing, _ too. She holds onto his cheek with her hand, keeping his face pressed to hers. She breathes in him as her heart just  _ pounds _ in her chest, and everything else in her body is just screaming out that he is about to make a fucking terrible decision that is going to hurt the both of them. 

She whispers, “Oh my God, I have  _ missed doing that  _ with you.”

He sighs. He says, “Missandei.” He reaches up to hold her hand, the one touching his face.

“That was a freebie I just stole from you,” she tells him. “I won’t kiss you again unless you want me to.”

“Miss — I’m sorry — I have to tell you something —”

“I was afraid that you were going to stay in the Summer Isles,” she continues whispering, fluttering her eyelashes against his cheek. “No one would fault you if you did. It probably would’ve been best for you. But I was afraid I wasn’t going to get to see you again.” She touches his face again, resisting the touch of his hand trying to keep her at a distance. She is actually trying to pull him closer. She tells him, “I’ve been afraid of that a lot. Grey — I —”

“Hey,” he says softly, pulling her hand fully off of his face, putting some distance between them. He looks pained. “Missandei, I care about you so much.”

She slowly and softly closes her eyes. She lightly shakes it. “I know,” she says. “I care about you so much, too. Grey, I’m in —

“I’m actually  _ not _ okay,” he quietly tells her, cutting her off. “I’m not okay at all. I’m kind of just — I’m kind of just drowning some days — still. I wake up panicked sometimes — because I think, you know, I’m stuck somewhere and no one is coming for me.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I don’t want you to feel that way. We actually all wanted you back  _ so badly.  _ I really wanted you —”

“Um, before — all of this happened — you know, when we were together, um, I didn’t really have the capacity for it,” he says quietly. “For us to be together, you know? I mean, of course  _ you know. _ You and I lived through it.”

“I pushed you too hard —”

“The thing is that you didn’t,” he says gently. “You just wanted normal things —”

“I was impatient with you —”

“I’m really sorry. You deserved a lot better.”

“No, I don’t,”  she says automatically. “I want to deserve you,”

And then they both freeze.

And then she stutters out this awkward laugh, at her awkward articulation.

He kind of smiles briefly, looking down at his hands. He kind of understands what she means — but with no specificity. 

He still corrects her. He still says, “You deserved a lot better than me. You deserved much more than what you got. You deserve someone you can support you and lift you up — instead of what you got — which was someone you constantly had to babysit, someone you had to tiptoe around and constantly watch for triggers with —”

“But Grey —”

“I think I know what you’re trying to say,” he says, cutting her off. “And please don’t say it. It’s just going to hurt the both of us.” He sharply inhales. “The thing is, I just  _ can’t _ be in a relationship right now. You’re fucking  _ amazing. _ If I had the capacity for a relationship, I’d  _ be with you _ — so fucking  _ fast.  _ And I’m definitely going to regret this for the rest of my life. But we  _ can’t _ — and not because of stupid work rules — but because I just  _ can’t. _ I’m a mess, and I don’t want you to babysit me anymore. It’s not fair to you. I — I also really need to be alone right now — because I need to get better at taking care of myself. I need to learn how to be healthy — before I can even attempt being there for someone else, you know? I’m really sorry, Missandei.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


So — she understands what he is saying. It completely makes sense to her. But she can’t hold in the rest of it. 

So in response to  _ all of that,  _ she thinks it’s really smart to just blurt out, “Grey, I love you. Grey, I just really love you.”

His face scrunches up into a wince — then a frown — then he says,  _ “Fuck,” _ as he touches his fingertips to his chest. “I knew that would hurt.”

“I can wait for you,” she says.

_ “What?” _

“Learn to take care of yourself,” she tells him. “Figure it all out, babe. And I’ll be ready for you when you’re ready for me.”

“No!” he blurts. “What? No! That’s fucking  _ crazy!” _

“What?” she asks quizzically.  _ “Why?” _

“Because it’s psychotic!”

“Huh? That’s a really strong word, Grey.”

“Don’t fucking wait for me!” he gripes. “That’s not what I’m asking you to do. You could be waiting forever. Just . . . move on.”

“No, I don’t want to just move on from you,” she argues. “Like, what kind of person who loves you would I be? If I just peaced out because you are struggling? I’m not just going to abandon you because —”

“Oh my God, Missandei, I’m  _ fine!” _ he shouts. “I’m  _ not _ struggling!”

She understands that he is lashing out in reflex — and he is being defensive because he feels really vulnerable right now. She knows she doesn’t have to say anything. So she pauses, staring at him, waiting him out.

And so he  _ does _ work it out for himself. He shakes his head quickly. “That was a reflex,” he mutters. “Sorry. Yeah, I’m totally struggling. I told you that — at the beginning of this conversation.” He sighs. 

“I think it’s really amazing that you want to prioritize taking better care of yourself,” she says gently, reaching out to run her fingers down his cheek. “I’m so glad. I want you to do this, too. I’m like — really actually excited that you’re gonna do this for yourself. I want to help you — however I can. God, I love you so much.”

“Oh my God, shut up,” he mutters, taking her freaking hand off of his face again, giving it back to her. “Stop saying that. This is not at all how I thought this conversation was gonna go.”

“How did you think it was gonna go?” she asks curiously.

He breaks eye contact. He looks out the front windshield, to a concrete wall. “I dunno. I thought you’d be madder about this. I thought it would just be the end for us. Maybe that’s why I was avoiding this so much. I was dreading the end — and your upsetting response — and the loss of your friendship as a result of it all.”

“I think you’re wrong and pessimistic about the outcome of this,” she whispers conspiratorially, smiling at his profile. “I don’t think this is the end of us. I really think this is actually the beginning for us.”

“Oh my God,  _ shut up, Missandei.” _

“I love you!” she says to him, earnestly and enthusiastically. 

“Stop saying that,” he mumbles. “It makes me so sad.”

“Why?” she asks. “It makes me happy and just  _ relieved _ to get that off my chest! Babe! We’re alive! We’re together in this car! You have decided to care about staying alive and being happy! This is  _ great!” _

He sighs. “What if you decide to be dumb enough to wait for me — and you wait for  _ years — _ and at the end of it, the happy and healthy version of me doesn’t even want to be with you?” He is tightly shaking his head. “What if that happens?”

“That would be so heartbreaking for me,” she says honestly. 

He pivots his head to face her again. His eyes are bugged out, like he’s saying, see!

“But nobody knows what will happen or how we will feel in the future. I only know how I feel right now. And I want to do  _ this _ right now. Maybe I will get tired of waiting for you after a week. Maybe I will wait for you  _ forever.” _

_ “Fuck!”  _ he snaps. “I can’t believe we’re arguing about this!”

“You can’t always make decisions for the both of us!” she says — kind of surprised by her own conclusion and her own utterance — kind of also gleeful about this realization. “You made a lot of decisions for the both of us in Valyria because it was work and you were like —  _ way  _ more equipped to make decisions. But  _ here, _ with  _ us,  _ I know things, too. I get a say in what happens to us, too.”

“Oh my God,” he says, more to himself than to her. “This is bananas.” And then, because he’s so all out of sorts and disoriented, because he’s also trying to stick it to her so that he can get  _ some _ kind of advantage in this conversation again, he just randomly decrees what he has been so afraid of. He says, “So we’re not having sex any time soon! That’s going to fuck me up! So get that out of your head!”

“Okay,” she says, agreeing readily, as she reaches up again to softly run her hands over his face. “I can wait on the sex. I can wait on a lot of things.”

“No, again — Miss — fuck — don’t just  _ wait  _ for me _.  _ Live your life.”

“I mean, I’m gonna do other stuff while I wait for you,” she says reasonably, trying not to laugh at him. “I mean, I’m not just gonna sit in a room and literally  _ wait _ for you. Like, I’ll still make plans and live my life and stuff. Like, the two things aren’t mutually exclusive, babe.”

“Goddammit, Missandei —”

“I haven't been happy without you,” she confesses, lowering her voice into some realness. “I’ve been really depressed actually. And I completely don’t want to be the kind of woman that is happy only when a man pays attention to her. I also don’t want to be the kind of woman who waits around for a man to get his shit together either —”

“Exactly!” he says. “So you need to —”

“This is nuanced though,” she cuts in. “You’re not just some man. You’re you. You’ve been through  _ a lot. _ I’m so happy you’re safe and you’re motivated to stay safe. You don’t need to pay attention to me, for me to be happy.”

“Don’t wait for me!” he shouts again. “Fuck!”

“This conversation is becoming circular,” she says, holding onto his face. “I’m not really negotiating here. Please note how I’m not forcing you to be with me. I’m letting you go a little bit because that’s what you are needing from me.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Before they say goodbye for the day — before she just floats on home and dreamily fantasizes about what the rest of their lives is gonna be like, she has him give her a hug — she asks him. She just wants to be reminded of how it feels to be touched and held by him.

Holy fuck, it is amazing. Her heart starts ramming into her chest as his hands float and then skim down the curve of her spine to settle on her waist. She gets drowsy and feels drunk as they press together in the awkward, tight space of the car. She full-on stops herself from trying to make out with him, as his face gets close and presses against her cheek. 

She softly sighs against him.

He flips out a little but still maintains his hold on her. He sounds hysterical as he says, “Can you  _ not?” _

“Not what?” she says softly, trying to orient her face to his.

“Make those sounds.”

She laughs at that — throaty and deep and sexy in his ears — as her hands clench in his shirt.

“Oh my God, we are  _ fucked.” _

“I’ve missed you,  _ so much,”  _ she confesses, running her hands across his spine, feeling the texture of his warm shirt underneath her hands.

“I’ve really missed you, too,” he says, swallowing hard. “I’m sorry I couldn’t even have a proper dinner with your dad.”

“It’s totally okay,” she says softly, running her hands up his body. “Don’t worry about it anymore. Hey, you’ve lost a lot of weight — and you said you’ve been having trouble eating?”

“Oh my God,” he says, loosening his hold on her just a little bit because his body is probably extra-gross to touch now. “I’ve been trying to eat. It’s no fun anymore. It’s been hard to put on weight because I don’t want to eat very much.”

She renews her tight hold on him. She squeezes her arms around him. She wishes that he would let her make him food and then let her manually feed it to him. She already knows he would definitely  _ not _ let her do that. “Well, you went through something deeply traumatic,” she tells him softly. “So I’m not surprised you’re having a hard time eating. I’m sorry. You used to love food.”

“I mean, most people love food,” he says plainly.

“Sure, baby,” she murmurs.

“Okay, seriously, you need to call me by my name and only by my name. Let’s not get it messy.”

“Okay, Grey,” she says, smiling a little bit. 

He practically rolls his eyes at her. But he’s settling into their new reality now. He manages to mutter, “I really want to gain back the weight, because every time I fucking look at myself — it’s so gross — and I just think about it, you know?”

“Yeah,” she says, smoothing her hands back down his back, making him shiver. That makes her think of sex — which makes her smile to herself. She pulls back a little to look him in the face. She says, “Same.”

He looks at her in confusion. 

“I mean, I want you to gain back the weight, too.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


She actually comes home in time for the last twenty minutes of the cooking show. 

Her dad is surprised — because he honestly didn’t expect her to come home at all. He expected that she’d be sleeping over at her partner’s place and that he’d be on his own for the night.

So he lightly comments on it, as she plops down barefoot and with a cold beer bottle onto the loveseat. She leans forward and grabs a handful of popcorn. 

He tells her, “You’re home early. Did you two have a good talk?”

“We had a great talk,” she tells him, her eyes trained on the TV, trying to make sense of what is going on. She is cramming the handful of popcorn into her mouth. “Is this the elimination challenge? Oh man, Dad, would you kill me if I had you stop this and then we rewatch from the beginning together?”

“Sure,” he says easily, palming up the remote. “We can do that.”

  
  


 

 


	53. Missy and Grey are not together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey finds that it's really hard to suddenly be healthy and happy when he's never prioritized it ever before in life. He is also as clean as he's ever been, and we should worry about whether he's moisturizing enough! The future love of his life is being mostly chill and giving him his space even though all she wants to do is trap him in her love. Good for you, Missy! And then there are also dogs in this chapter!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all, a couple of announcements. First off, thanks for your patience. I have missed you. My job is such an annoying threat to this story and I hate that it is, too! Grr!
> 
> Second, if y'all were following my other fic, She and He, know that the beautiful kalipersephone has taken up podcasting it. [LISTEN HERE.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17582885/chapters/41443676)

  
  
  
  
  


 

He confides in Sam and tells Sam that he’s scared that he has used up all of his luck in life. He tells Sam that he has this sixth sense, this premonition that the next time shit goes down, he’s going to die. That is why he is moving forward with trepidation and a lot of anxiety. He tells Sam he feels like he has two options laid out ahead of him. He can either die young for a sense of purpose, doing the thing that he is the very best at — or he can cowardly duck out of his vocation and just live out the rest of life bored, impotent, depressed, and listless. 

“My parents are going to get hit hard by my death,” Grey mutters, staring ahead at desaturated skyline and the brown, stout trees. “I had a lot of time to think about that when I was in Valyria. I kept thinking about how they were going to plan my funeral without my body — and how my mom was going to go back to work and keep telling her students to dream big and get a great education — knowing that there were just some things about my life that they were never allowed to be a part of.” 

As they walk around the duck pond, they both acknowledge that this line of thinking is wholly unlike Grey — this pessimistic fatalism, this sense of inevitability in his fate. 

Sam cautiously says, “You don’t know that you’re going to die.” And he means  _ tomorrow. _ Grey doesn’t know  _ when _ he’s going to die.

But Grey corrects nevertheless. He says, “Everyone dies. All of us must die.”

Grey thinks that death is the one constant in life — and it’s hard enough to have his parents’ and brother’s hopes for him on his conscience. He doesn’t want to let Missandei down with this terrible thing about him, too.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He starts attempting to take better care of himself in a really prescriptive way — it feels like he’s painting by the numbers. Sam tells him it’s because he’s learning a new skill, and as these things often go — the first few attempts often feel awkward and bumbling because he is not yet practiced. Sam tells him that it’s fine for it to feel artificial for a while. One day, it will feel natural. One day, he won’t even have to remind himself to be intentional with resting his body and mind.

He starts taking baths because a big hang-up he has inherited from his time in Valyria is that it’s now hard for him to feel very clean. He has become a little bit more obsessive with organization and cleanliness. He buys an exfoliating sponge and oatmeal bar soap. He soaks his body in shockingly hot water for nearly an hour, before he methodically sloughs off dead skin using the sponge. He worries that he’s teetering on the edge of being compulsive about this — and he keeps asking Sam, if he’s tipping over to a dark obsessiveness with this. 

Sam keeps telling Grey that only Grey knows the answer to this. Sam keeps telling Grey that he should constantly check in with himself and assess.

There’s a quiet and dark part of him that no longer trusts his own self. He no longer believes that he is a good-enough judge of his own mental health. Sometimes he is sure that he is irrevocably mentally deficient and that later, after Grey is dead because of mistakes that he will soon make, Sam will look back on this with hindsight and say that the warning signs had been there. Sam will say that Grey’s obsessive tendencies started flaring soon after he came back from Valyria. For instance, it takes him nearly two hours to bathe now. He bathes once a day now. He forgoes sleep sometimes, just to bathe. 

He has to shower after he bathes because there’s a part of him that feels like he’s sitting in his own filth, in the bath. Sometimes his skin feels tender and raw — but super smooth and shiny. Sometimes he falls asleep in his bed still damp, lying askew. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


He becomes pretty good at eating one kind of thing and only one kind of thing. He finds that that’s the best way for him to get enough calories in a day — because otherwise he’d give up a lot of mental space over to agonizing about which food is  _ okay _ enough to eat. He currently can’t handle foods that he used to love. He can’t handle textures that are too wet or slippery — so a lot of pickled foods are out. He can’t handle anything too soft or tender — because a lot of what they fed him in Valyria was mash that he had to eat in the dark. 

He starts eating boring sandwiches — just slabs of beef pressed in between two pieces of toast, with a smear of butter. He creates this crunchy calorie bomb for himself, and he likes that he doesn’t have to worry about it or think about it because he’s the only one making his own food. He stops eating the cafeteria food at work, because that had been stressing him out. He stops forcing himself to eat at restaurants, because that’s been stressing him out. He stops himself from being polite and eating the food that his friends make for him — because that’s been stressing him out.

He thinks that Theon would understand — that of all people, Theon would understand the most. But actually, Theon’s healing has progressed enough that Theon has kind of forgotten. Theon looks a little bit hurt, when Grey awkwardly but politely declines dinner. 

“Just let me know your dietary restrictions,” Theon urges. “I can cook stuff that you can eat.”

Grey grimaces. “I’m sorry — but I can’t right now. I can bring over food and eat with you though?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He finds that he is hyperaware of the neediness of everyone in his life. It is a fucking lot of pressure, and he hates feeling like he is letting everyone down. 

For instance, nearly everyone in his life needs for him to telegraph his okayness. Sam needs for him to be sane so that Sam can clear him to go back into the field. Drogo needs for him to be fully ramped up so that he can fill this void that his absence has left on the team. Selmy needs the exact same thing from him. His teammates need for him to go back to being sardonic and sarcastic and bulletproof, because maybe his steadiness holds their own anxieties at bay. 

And she needs for him to be okay so that she can start planning out her future again.  

He has so many regrets. When he thinks about it, he hates himself  _ so much  _ for leading her on and for allowing her to think that it’s a good idea for her to be doing what she is doing — which is put her fucking life on hold for this idealized version of him that will never fucking exist _. _ He hates that he can’t control his idiot self better. He hates that he doesn’t currently have the guts or the capacity to have another conversation with her, to really cement the fact that she needs to move on because he’s going to eventually die sooner rather than later. She needs to cut her losses, right now. 

He hates that she is waiting for something that will likely never come to fruition. He hates it because it makes him feel like a failure. He also hates it because it makes him feel wrapped up in this sense of loss.

He can  _ feel _ her eyes on him, tracking him and trying to pinpoint his progress. He already knows that he will not live up to her hopes for him and for them. He is dreading the moment she realizes this and gives up on him. It will hurt a lot. He already feels so sad and so terrible over it. And sometimes — he is stupid enough to let himself fantasize about unrealistic, optimal outcomes. 

He doesn’t know how to act around her. Sometimes it feels like she’s the closest person in the world to him because of what they have been through together. Other times, she feels like an alien to him because she now looks at him with such softness, and this is a new thing in their dynamic. He interprets her looks as a response to him being weak because he can’t help it. He doesn’t like the way she looks at him sometimes. 

She is friendly with him because she is a nice person who is a little shortsightedly optimistic. She quietly asks him how it’s going at the coffee machine — causing his heart to start throbbing in pain — due to her proximity, due to the fact that it’s actually not going  _ good _ at all. He doesn’t feel like he can be truthful — and that stresses him out, that he has to keep lying about himself to save other people. 

With a shrug, he still tells her, “Fine — it’s going,” as his heart hammers in his chest. 

“That’s good,” she says, letting a small smile slip out. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


He is struggling hard — and at the very least, he understands this for himself. He finds that he has conditioned all of the people in his life a certain way. As such, he has inherited a whole host of problems that he is not currently equipped to deal with. Drogo keeps wanting him to go out to bars to shoot the shit. Drogo keeps inviting him out to go do stuff — and Grey’s been too fucking weak to say no to these things. So he makes himself go out and he feels tense and deeply dissatisfied with himself at the end of the night. 

He still desperately wants his parents’ approval. He still desperately is afraid to let them know the truth about him. 

When he Skypes with them, he finds himself pushing himself to showcase his okayness to them. He finds himself lying a little bit — through how he presents. He tells them work is good. Drogo is very good. They are spending a lot of time together — and that’s been good for him. He tells his folks that he’s been trying really hard to take better care of himself — but it’s been hard — but he’s trying. Progress is incremental — slow, but steady.

He doesn’t have the words to tell them that he’s actually scared about how hard this is. He’s very scared that he will discover he’s made to be dysfunctional. And his dysfunction will break their hearts eventually. Because he will die, and they won’t understand why.

His parents have become very sentimental and emotional with him — maybe because they are insightful and they are now so good at seeing through his lies.

Over Skype, his mom tears up and whispers, “We love you so much, my baby,” like she also senses that their time together is shortening.

His dad can’t talk much on Skype these days — because his dad is stoic and silent when he gets emotional. Grey just has to watch his dad sit stiffly next to his mom’s expressive face. 

Grey finds himself getting choked up over that. He says, “I love you guys, too.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei says, “Oh my God,” as she gets hit in the face with the soft rasp of fur and a cold, wet lick on the mouth. She holds up her hands in front of her face, to ward off more intrusive kisses. They both smell like dog pee. She says,  _ “Dany,  _ what are you going to  _ do?” _

Dany is stiffly standing up — looming over Missandei and the pitbull puppies with their lavender and forest green leashes in her fist. 

Dany is  _ pissed. _ Dany just detailed to Missandei this convoluted story about her asshole of a brother and how she found these two squirming puppies neglected and caged up in their own filth in a corner of his penthouse apartment. When Dany demanded to know why he was keeping two baby dogs in his home like that, he dryly told her they are just animals. 

Dany says, “I don’t know. Give them to a shelter?” And then, after a bit of a pause, Dany says, “So that they can be overlooked in favor of cuter dogs and then later euthanized because they are undersocialized and like to fear-bite because  _ my brother is a fucking psychopath.”  _ Dany rolls her eyes at herself. “That’s probably what I will do.”

“Little babies are  _ so cute  _ though _ ,”  _ Missandei gushes from her position on the floor, leaning over only to get slammed in the mouth by another smelly puppy kiss. “How can anyone not want to take you home?” she says to the smaller puppy, the girl.

“They are really attached to each other,” Dany muses. “They can’t be separated. They’d have to be adopted together — I mean, I’d want for them to be adopted together.”

“Are they brother and sister?” Missy asks.

“Probably?” Dany sighs. “Do you and your dad want dogs?”

“Ah, sorry,” Missy says, wincing. “I can’t show up at home with two dogs and be like, ‘Surprise, Dad!’ We’d have to talk about it a lot, because he’d be the one doing the most caretaking. It would depend on whether or not my dad wants two dogs.”

“Can you ask him?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Surprisingly, she finds his presence to have a very calming effect on her. Her heart might be slamming against the inner wall of her chest whenever he is nearby, but her mind is languid and relaxed. Her breathing is even. She thinks that she can probably put up with this kind of thing indefinitely — his proximity, this awkward small talk, the details of his face in her gaze, his continuing aliveness. 

It’s pretty nuts to be in love with someone — to have them know it — to not be able to be  _ with them, _ but to still have a working relationship and friendship with them. Like, it is pretty nuts how much she just basks in the soapy way he smells and the quiet way he speaks in meetings and the general sound of his voice. 

It’s really insane, the effort she has to apply toward stopping her hands from reaching out to him to touch him and hold him in PG and non-PG ways. 

She has been thinking that she knows  _ now,  _ what it must’ve felt like and what it must’ve been like, all of the times that her parents recalled the story of them meeting and falling for each other — how her mother always just said that  _ she just knew  _ Missandei’s dad was the one. __

Missandei spent a few years being kind of envious and also being skeptical. Sometimes stories get reworked during retellings. How can people just  _ know? _

Right now, she just  _ knows. _ She knows that she wants to spend the rest of her life with him. She knows she would like to have the opportunity to get her heart completely ripped out with a shitty terminal cancer diagnosis again. She knows that even that pain would be worth the chance to just love him.

She runs into him at the gym — kind of on purpose. They intersect because she’s been working out every day after work for  _ hours _ for the last fucking five days in a row because she’s been hoping for a glimpse of him. She’s been hoping that she can have two seconds of small talk with him at the water fountain, which would fortify her for another week. She has been trying to keep her expectations of him manageable. She pleasantly thinks that she’s going to get _ so buff _ and  _ so fit _ just trying to low-key stalk him.

She’s joking around with Pia at the squat rack, holding just the bar across her shoulders, grunting with effort like a wild animal, pumping herself up to squat up and down with basically a broomstick on her back. To herself, to the mirror version of herself, she is saying, “Come on, girl, you’ve  _ got this!  _ Power through, baby!  _ Power through!” _

Pia is sitting on a bench, turning red from cracking up. 

This started because Pia randomly commented on how Missandei is deathly silent when she is working out, like Pia doesn’t know that Missy will  _ obsess  _ over that observation and will over-correct like a nut.  

Grey shows up in the midst of all of the laughing — to the sound of bass-heavy hip hop that Pia put on — and also to the sound of Missandei’s loud grunting and self motivation. 

He looks totally confused, right away. He blinks in surprise.

She recognizes him right away and a happy zip of elation just blooms inside her body. She thinks that his face is the fucking  _ cutest shit ever. _

Pia says, “Hey, Grey!”

He says, “Oh, hey. What’s up? How’s it going?”

“Good! Do you want us to turn the music down?”

“No, it’s okay. I have earbuds.”

He is stopping herself from looking at her. She smiles at him — to herself. 

And then she largely just carries on with her workout.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Pia leaves after another half hour. Missandei lingers behind even though her body is tired and sore because she still wants to creep on him a little bit. She ends her workout with her sweaty body rolling around on an exercise ball, stretching out her spine. She catches a glimpse of him running on the treadmill — and she tells herself that this is enough for the time being.

She’s cleaning up and rolling up a yoga mat when he slowly walks up to her. 

She understands that  _ now _ is the appropriate time to look him in the face and to have a direct interaction with him. She stands up, smiling at him.

He holds his hand up — as if he’s blocking light from his eyes. He says, “Holy shit, dial it down a few notches.” He is talking about her smile.

She laughs — it makes him feel grateful, that she isn’t offended by him. She also obediently makes an effort at scaling back her smile a little bit. She says, “Hey, you.”

“Hi back,” he says, his mouth twitching as it fights around its own bright smile, too. “I’m done working out. I just wanted to say hi and bye before I headed out.”

“Okay!” she says.

“This is a little awkward, huh?” he observes — still trying to let himself relax and smile — still fighting with his own face.

That makes her giggle. She says, “Um, speak for yourself. I’m cool with how this is going. Like, I’m cool with how I tacked on an extra half an hour of rolling around on a ball just to be around you more, just to breathe the same air as you.”

This makes him laugh in shock.

She allows herself another giggle fit. “I mean, we both know that’s what I was doing,” she says in between laughs, hugging her own sweaty body with her arms. “I mean, we both know I’m totally obsessed with you.”

“Oh my God,” he mutters, as he clamps his hand right over his mouth. He finds that her laughter is infectious, and he’s mindlessly trying to stop himself from descending into it with her. 

“You look really cute today!” she blurts.

Here, his eyes widen comically. He snorts. And then he says, “Stop!” 

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” she says, holding her hands up, still laughing. “I’ll behave now. But maybe you shouldn’t be walking around looking all cute and harassable and stuff. Oh my gosh, I’m sorry! I’m joking! Sort of! I’ll try to behave! Promise! Scout’s honor.” 

She was never in scouts — but she still makes up a salute on the spot anyways. 

This actually does make him forget himself and laugh for real. For a moment, being around her stops being painful for him. In this moment, he suddenly remembers something that he really,  _ really  _ likes about her. He really likes that she’s such a beautiful-looking dork. He likes how she cannot hide a fucking thing from him — he can see everything on her face. He can see how she feels about him —  _ at this exact moment. _ He knows that it’s not a lie.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She comes home smelling like flowers, sugar, and the secrets of lonely men. She comes home at four in the morning after a routine shift. 

Her windbreaker is swishy and nylon, covering most of her womanly body and her tight dress as she plops herself in front of a really pretty spread that her dad has prepared for her. Herbal, non-caffeinated tea, a shortbread biscuit, a little turkey wrap, and a small pile of cherry tomatoes from their garden.

Her eyeliner has smeared from sweat and the matte red lipstick remains. She takes out her phone to take a picture of the spread as she says, “Daddy! This is so cute!” 

“Thanks, honey.”

She doesn’t realize that he is anxiously trying to butter her up for something. He doesn’t realize that she’s trying to sound young and sweet, sitting in front of him in her hooker-wear, because she’s about to ask him if he might want  _ two puppies  _ to take care of. 

He ends up going first — completely randomly and accidentally. 

He slowly tells her, “So there’s this woman — that I know. We’ve been — we’ve been spending a little bit of time getting to know one another. I would — I would like for you to meet her.”

Missandei’s jaw — full of half-masticated turkey and lettuce — drops. She says, “What?” And then her eyes widen. Then she says, “Dad! Do you have a  _ girlfriend!” _

  
  
  
  
  
  



	54. Missy's dad has a lady friend!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy learns her dad is probably getting more action than she is. She also learns her brothers are dingleberries who are a little uptight and old-fashioned. Grey's mommy continues to be obsessed with him and he's like, getting real tired of it. Drogo cannot relate. Missy continues to love Grey even though he's unavailable to love, aw. Finally, WHAT IS DANY GOING TO DO WITH THESE DOGGIES?!

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


She starts teasing her dad about his new “lover,” and he is not at all into it. In fact, he tells tells her to knock it off and that she’s not funny whatsoever. 

She knows he’s really nervous and anxious about this — probably about the egregious betrayal that he is willfully committing against the love of his life, Missandei’s mom. Missy knows he’s anxious based on the way he starts to erratically fuss over the hot water kettle on the stove, even though everything is clean and pristine. He wets a sponge and starts vigorously wiping down surfaces that are already smooth and shiny. He also starts to deflect and change the subject, now experiencing a certain remorse, guilt, and regret over telling his youngest about the latest development in his life.

To her, he says, “We should get a new oven,” because he’s been wanting to install a gas line for years now. Maybe now is just the right time to do it. The stove at the house that he used to own with his wife was a gas stove, not an electric one.  

To him, she says, “What’s her name? How did you guys meet?  _ When  _ on Earth did you have the time to go out and meet someone new? You never go anywhere — oh my gosh, it was during the daytime, wasn’t it? You go do stuff while I’m at work!”

It sounds accidentally accusatory. So he feels deep shame over it.

Her dad drops his head a little bit and shrugs. He quietly tells her, “I go to the library sometimes.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They end up having a really amazing conversation, actually. She’s sleepy and yawning. He’s constantly trying to end their talk so she can go upstairs and get some rest — and she still wants to know  _ everything. _

She continues to unwittingly make him feel a little bad for keeping secrets from her. He internally struggles with this — with his own secretiveness — as he tells her that he didn’t intentionally keep secrets from her. He tells her that his logic was that he didn’t want to take up space in her mind with something unless he knew it was something real and something substantial enough to take up space with. He stops himself from saying that he’s been reluctant to burden her because she’s had a really tough few months. He didn’t want to be another thing for her to deal with. 

She observes to herself that they are both avoiding talking about her mother out loud, even though her mother and his wife hangs over their minds every day. She wants to know if her dad’s new friend is anything like her mother — she wants to figure out if this will bother her or if it will be a relief to her.  

He wants her to know that his new friend is a little bit like his wife in the blander ways — nice and funny and caring — but also distinctly unlike his wife because it would be weird and it would also be painful if she was too much like his wife.

He and his daughter talk about how her brothers are going to take it. He doesn’t think they’ll take it badly, but he doesn’t think they’ll be happy about this either. Missandei readily agrees with this — which makes him feel a little bit tired already, over the prospect of telling his sons about Bettie.  

His daughter asks him for a photo. He tells her he doesn’t have one. He also preemptively tells her that Bettie isn’t on Facebook or any of the things, so Missandei cannot look her up. He knows his kid. He knows what she must be thinking — and yet he still waits for her to ask instead of volunteering the information himself.

Thoughtfully, and also with these expressive eyes, she asks him, “Is she Naathi? Bettie’s not really a Naathi name, is it?”

“She’s white,” he says.

“Oh my gosh!” she says, releasing a huge gush of air. “And you met at the library!” 

“What does that mean?” he asks.

She straightens up in her seat and leans over to grab her phone. She starts scrolling through it, biting back another yawn, the blue light casting over her facial features in a way that makes him feel a little bit sick inside. At certain angles, in a certain light, his daughter sometimes looks exactly like his wife. This used to fill him with comfort and warmth inside. He used to marvel at this all the time with his friends and family members. Now though, there’s some of the happiness — but it’s also a punch to the gut every time he sees the resemblance. 

His daughter shows him her phone screen. Her finger flicks over the screen. There are photos of women and words. 

She says to him, “Daddy, these people are more who I envisioned for you. I was thinking like, you know — Naathi widowers or divorcees who are well-traveled and artsy. Like, she’s a photographer. And this one is a mountaineer! Oh, and she owns this gluten-free bakery.”

“Oh,” he says awkwardly — staring at her flicking through the profiles. He does not even know what to make of this. “Oh, well, Bettie isn’t —”

“It’s cool!” she interjects, pulling her phone back and turning it off. “I think I was envisioning you with someone that  _ I _ would want to date if I were  _ you _ — and that’s a little nuts. I’m sure Bettie is great!” 

“We’re  _ not _ dating,” he corrects. “We’re old. And we’re just becoming friendly.”  

His daughter laughs into the heel of her hand and boldly asks, “Have you guys kissed yet? You know, just as friends?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missy quickly tells Dany that, sorry, her dad is not going to take in two pit bull puppies. He doesn’t have the energy to be constantly picking up poop and walking them all the time. She tells Dany that at this point in life, her dad is more like a cat person. 

Missandei tells Dany as quickly as possible so Dany isn’t left hanging — so she tells Dany via text message.

Dany actually cannot answer right away, because she is in the midst of trying not to  _ lose her complete shit _ as she holds a pair of mismatched, ruined leather boots in her hands. The dogs are running all around her, knocking into her like two cannon balls because they are so excited to see her. 

She’s trying not to lose her mind and start sobbing over this, because she certainly cannot be the kind of woman who cries over shoes. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Drogo is with Grey when Grey finds a note in his mailbox along with all of his mail on the first floor of his building. The note is from the mail carrier. It tells him that he has a package left for him in one of the lockers. 

Drogo is hovering nearby with a case of beer in hand and two crispy, near-burnt hot pizzas on his forearm because this was what they settled on after about fifteen minutes of agonizing from Grey. Grey shoves the key into the correct locker and opens up the door.

In there, he just finds a nondescript cardboard box from Amazon. He exchanges a glance with Drogo, who is purely uninterested because all Drogo wants to do is eat already. 

Grey mutters, “I hope it’s anthrax, and this is just the end of me,” as he picks up the box and holds it in his arms. He starts walking toward the elevators with his glower already in full effect.

“I really hope it’s not!” Drogo hollers, lightly jogging up behind Grey with all of their stuff.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He figures out quickly that the package is totally from his parents — more specifically, his mother. He knows when he opens it and sees a home hub device with video conferencing capabilities because it’s not enough for him to have prescheduled video calls with his folks. His mom now wants to be able to have video calls with him  _ whenever _ she feels like it. 

He hears Drogo say, “Cool!” behind him, as Grey groans and says, “What the fuck is this shit?”

He sits and eats his charred pizza — he requested this — resentfully — as Drogo sucks down the contents of a beer bottle before he starts ripping apart the package and installing it for Grey even though he told Drogo he’d like to return it. 

Drogo doesn’t get Grey’s need for space from his mom because Drogo is really, really close to his own mother. Grey figured this out because, in his continuing intimacy with Drogo, he tried to explain how annoying his own mother is to him by telling Drogo that his mom is so obsessed with him that she would be ecstatic if he ended up married to someone who is exactly like her. She would see nothing wrong in her doppelganger being shacked up with her son. Like, her obsession with him verges on that kind of creepiness. 

Grey figured out that Drogo’s a legit mama’s boy because Drogo basically was like, dude — I’d marry my mom in a heartbeat! 

And Grey was like,  _ what? _

Grey has learned that Drogo’s mom  _ is _ his other best friend, so as Drogo rips open and sets up Grey’s new home surveillance equipment for Grey’s mom, Drogo is already talking about how he should be getting one of these for himself so that he can chat with his mom while he’s cooking dinner or getting ready for work.

Drogo holds Grey’s personal phone up to him, so that Grey can fingerprint it and unlock it, so that Drogo can sync everything in Grey’s life to this new machine.  

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey watches despondently as Drogo tests out the video calling feature by ringing up Grey’s mom. 

Grey listens as Drogo cheerfully says, “Hey, Sanaa!” and he doesn’t even bother feeling any sort of way about Drogo now being on a first name basis with his mom. 

Grey listens as his mom basically coos and says, “Hey, honey! I was expecting Nudho, but this such a nice surprise!” talking like she’s  _ not at all _ surprised to see Drogo’s dumb fucking face on her screen. “I see you’re with him right now. Are you using the new tablet?”

“Yes! It’s really cool!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


As expected and as predicted, her brothers are not over the moon that their dad has a special friend at all. Her brothers say that they don’t get why the rest of their dad’s life until death isn’t just about his kids and his grandkids. What her brothers aren’t saying is that they really resent the idea that their mom can be replaced like this. 

She doesn’t have the kind of relationship with her older brothers where she can just baldly call them out on their self-centered bullshit. They also don’t have the consistent emotional intelligence required to be self-aware enough — that their deal is that they just miss and love their mother too much that they are just being dicks about their dad finding happiness with someone new.

Over group chat, Missy strategically tries to appeal to their manliness. She’s also kind of joking around — in a completely truthful way — as she writes out: _Honestly, do you really expect Dad to be celibate for the rest of his life? He already hasn’t had any sex in_ _ years.  Dude deserves to get some. _

Mars writes back: _Missandei. Don’t be gross._

  
  
  
  
  
  


Sam says that he feels okay clearing Grey to go back into the field, if Grey wants to go back into the field. Grey has told Sam that it’s probably best for him to have another month in the surveillance van — just to be sure he is not psychotic and won’t suffer a mental breakdown on the job and accidentally kill himself or the people around him. 

And then, upon Sam’s tepid correction — that that’s not how psychosis works — Grey had to snap at Sam and say that he was just fucking kidding, and no one ever gets his jokes! He just would like to stay in the van for a little while longer because there’s no rush, right?

Sam affirmed that. Yes, there is no rush.

So Grey spends his nights hanging out with Daario, half-listening to Daario threaten to take Grey out on his boat again, mostly listening to the conversations that johns have with Missandei. It’s about the same as he remembers — sometimes perfunctory and routine, sometimes a little creepy, sometimes a little sad, and sometimes it’s a little angering. 

He often thinks about how fucking weird it is that he is back here, doing  _ this. _ He often thinks about how comparatively slow moving and muddy life feels, when he doesn’t feel like he’s going to die in the next moment. He thinks about all of the time and space that he needs to fill up in order to seem like he is still moving forward.

He’s tired and spacing out a little bit at the end of the shift, as Robb says a few words that he hopes are meaningful — about Grey being back.  

Grey realizes that he’s expected to speak and respond to this. So he blearily says, “Um, it’s good to be back,” as Gendry claps him on the shoulder.

  
  
  
  
  
  


They end up leaving the locker rooms and walking to their cars at the same time. For once, she didn’t purposely plan this — for once, it’s just a nice little bit of happenstance. 

She smiles at this profile — secretly and silently — because she also thinks that it’s really, really great to have him back. There were some aspects of the night that felt like old times — she was able to hear him in her head — there were certain points in prep when she looked over and just saw his face there. That sort of thing makes her feel gratitude.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He would like for some of their conversations to  _ not _ be so heavy and serious. He would like for them to talk about stuff that isn’t his mental health and his healing and whether or not he’s ever going to be “normal.”

He’d also like for some of their conversations to not contain any sort of batshit declaration of love and devotion. It still makes him feel terrible and awkward and regretful.

He’d honestly just like for a lot of things to go back to how it used to be. He’d like to be kind of unaware of how she feels about him. He’d like for his brain not to remember the emotional things they have said to one another. He’d like to stop constantly thinking about how he’s a huge failure and how he’s going to let her down. He’d like to just be able to go back to making fun of her earnestness. He’d like for the driving force of their relationship to go back to her being pretty bad at her job. He wouldn’t even mind it if they went back to him being fairly nervous and sure that his lack of dick was completely repulsive to her.

“My dad has a girlfriend.”

He blinks. He’s caught off guard. He says, “Huh?”

“My dad has a girlfriend — or I guess a woman friend is a better term for it,” she says, slowing down her footsteps as she nears his car. She’s parked another fifty feet over. “I just learned about it, and it’s kind of weird? But it’s also like — I’m happy for him.”

Then, as a memory of another conversation flashes in his mind, he blurts out, “Oh, I remember you wanted your dad to date — but now that it’s happening, it’s a little weird?”

She nods, hiking her bag up higher on her shoulder. “I think it’s because she’s not who I would’ve picked out for him?”

He also nods. “Ah, yes. The misguided dating app.”

Her mouth twitches into a smile. “It wasn’t _ that  _ misguided.”

“It was way misguided,” he says with certainty. “Have you met her? Is she cool?”

“Not yet,” she says. “She doesn’t seem super cool. She seems shy and a little like, socially awkward? Just based on the way my dad talks about her — but I think that’s good because my mom was super cool. My mom was a babe. I think it’s turning out to be a bit of a relief — that this woman is not like my mom very much.”

“Yeah?” he says, his voice lilting up kind of wistfully. “You don’t want your dad to find and date your mom’s twin?”  

She scrunches up her nose — in aversion. She says, “Uh, no. That’s icky. There’s only one person who was like my mom, and that was my mom. My dad should be with someone different.”

“That’s interesting that you say that — because I was talking to Drogo about something in this vein, and Drogo told me he’d totally be with someone exactly like his mom if he could.”

“He  _ would,”  _ Missandei says, her eyes bugging out a little. “Drogo is totally the type where — no woman would ever measure up to the ideal of his mother, so he sabotages relationships and ruins women’s self-esteem because they don’t compare to his mother.”  She pauses. Then in a deadpan, she says, “Oh my God, I just figured out Drogo.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She basically wants to touch him and bury her face in his smell for hours, but for the sake of not sexually harassing him all the time and making him feel uncomfortable around her — she does not act on her feelings. 

They just continue having a pretty normal, pretty dull, pretty awesomely neat conversation about something chill and frivolous and mundane. For a moment, it really feels like her biggest concern in life is her dad potentially being romantic with someone new and her having to watch it happen and understand that life is long and people can feel that way about more than one person, over the course of time.     

She wants to ask him out — platonically. She wants to ask him out to dinner or to coffee again or to lunch. She basically just wants more time with this person just to talk with him more — but she doesn’t want to pressure him or make him feel obligated to her. She keeps remembering that this was something he struggled with when they were together.

She wants to tell him about Dany and the two aggressive dogs Dany doesn’t know what to do with. She wants to tell him more about her dad potentially being sexually active again and how that would affect  _ her  _ life. She wants to talk to him about work now that he has clearance again — and what he thinks about fucking Lysa Arryn’s house arrest and what he has heard about Baelish. She wants to talk to him about Yiantha and what he knows about women who have babies in prison. She wants to talk to him about Daario shaving his facial hair and how it was scary and disorienting to see Daario clean-shaven — is Daario okay or is Daario on the verge of an emotional breakdown because Dany broke up with him? She wants to talk to him about just a lot of stuff. She misses his thoughts, his insights, and the shockingly brutal things he sometimes says that makes her laugh. She misses the hours they used to spend together — just talking. 

She ends the conversation before it gets awkward and she comes across needy. As she starts walking backwards — so he doesn’t have to feel like he has to decide whether or not to hug her — she says, “Alright, so I’ll see you later! It was really cool to have you on the team today. I know it’s corny, but it was honestly just really comforting having you back like that.”

“It was good to be back,” he calls back out to her. “It was eerie, but ultimately really good.”

“See you tomorrow!”

“See ya.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey actually learns all about Dany’s aggressive dogs for himself, because she introduces him to them at her apartment as an activity for them to do together in the course of staying on friendlier terms. She also cannot leave them alone for long in her apartment because they shit and piss over everything before they tear apart her clothes, her shoes, and her expensive furniture.

She’s trying to sell him on the dogs — because she is desperate and a man with depression and anxiety issues related to physical, emotional, and psychological trauma seems like a good candidate to take care of two challenging, undersocialized, aggressive dogs. 

Right away, before she can ask him if he’d like to have the dogs, Grey anticipates what her goal is and straight up tells her, “My building doesn’t allow pets. I’m also not moving. I also don’t want dogs right now, Daenerys. Sorry.”

 Her face drops. She says, _ “Fuck.” _

And then reasonably, as he stoops down to pet the female underneath her chin, he asks, “Why don’t you just keep them? They are cute. Is it okay to touch her? Is she going to bite me?” 

“I’m not a dog person,” Dany says. “I’m not a pet person. I’m barely like, a person-person. She might bite.”

  
  
  
  
  
  



	55. Missy and Dany finally talk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this episode, Grey gets to hold a gun again. It's very scary and exciting for him. Missy and Dany finally say some real things to each other, spurred on by the dog-stinky shambles that is Dany's life. Missy meets her dad's new lady friend. Grey goes to a doctor and is in disbelief over the medical news he gets. And finally, something big is happening at work!

  


Missandei sits on a bench and patiently waits in her skin-tight dress as the guys around her shrug into their jackets, prep and load the surveillance equipment, and check over their checklists. 

She scans her eyes over to Grey when he walks onto the loading dock, watching silently as he pulls his new-old government-issued gun out of its holster and rolls it in his hands, pointing the muzzle away from everyone else. She watches him eject the magazine to look at it for a brief moment. She watches him click it back in place before rolling the gun in his hands again. 

She bites down on her lower lip — as he raises his eyes and catches her watching him. He looks a little anxious and stressed out, so he doesn’t smile at her. She doesn’t need to talk to him to know why he is anxious and stressed out. She just watches as he just maintains eye contact and reaches around his body to reholster his gun. 

She starts mouthing something to him — he’s too far away to hear her speaking voice — she just wants to lighten the mood a little. Her mouth is saying to him that she’s happy he’s reuniting with the true love of his life. 

He looks confused, because he’s not reading her lips very well — which makes her break out into a real laugh. 

And, upon seeing her laugh, his shoulders droop, his rigid body goes languid, and face just finally drops into this brief — and brilliant — smile.

  
  
  


Grey’s first night back is blessedly routine — nothing big happens, just the regular sort of things. He is quiet, near-silent in her ear, save for the occasional hum of affirmation or encouragement, as she leans over and propositions men in cars. 

She is perversely giddy about it — about having Grey run point again. Robb is great and amazing and well-trained, and Grey is similarly great and well-trained — but Grey makes her perform her job the very best. He brings out the very best in her, whether it’s because she feels such good pressure to be completely on her shit when he is there, pushing them all up with his excellence — or whether it’s because of what they have all gone through together. The entire team is extra focused tonight, because maybe everyone else also needs tonight to just go perfectly.

After three hours and six very efficient busts — six men to process and potentially interview later — six reports to write — they start to splinter off into different directions at the end of the night, but not before pausing to give some meaning to this minor thing they have accomplished together.

Gendry’s face is bright and pink from the chill air, as he squeezes Grey’s arm. He says, “Dude — you killed it tonight, boss.”

Once his baseball cap gets lifted, Grey's face looks shiny with a sheen of sweat — under the bright lights of their loading dock. He’s been sweating because he’s been nervous all night. So he cracks the smallest smile at Gendry’s compliment — mostly at how deliberate and careful it all sounds.

And like every other man on the team, she also gives Grey a pat on the shoulder and a “good job!” as she walks by him, on the way to the women’s locker room. 

  
  
  


His mom wants to know when he is going to visit again — or when she and his dad can come visit him. Being teachers, their schedule is unerringly consistent — with breaks and vacations occurring at the same times every year — so his mom doesn’t bother telling him her availability. She already knows that he knows. His parents have a one-week break in two months. 

He would still love for his mom to get off his balls a little bit. However, he understands that her imposing presence in his life is a byproduct of a very good thing. He is closer to his mom than ever before in his adulthood. They probably both don’t know what to make of this. His mom probably resorts to treating him like a child because of the newness. His brother has told him that their mother is less crazy with Azzie — probably because Azzie doesn’t work a job that could result in death at any moment.

He’s working at being more honest with them, so into the freaking screen of the home hub that she bought him, he tells his mom, “Ma, you and Dad can come whenever. I will probably be working. You can chill at my place while I’m at work. We can hang out whenever there’s a spot of time. But I’m telling ya, it’s not going to be what you want.”

In response to this, his mom moves her face closer to the camera, so that it’s blown out — like she thinks moving her face closer to her screen will allow her to see more of him. She says to him, “What are you cooking right now? Show me.”

He lifts his sizzling pan from the stove to show her a grilled cheese sandwich. He is still reliant on crispy calorie bombs with no nutritional value to get his weight back up. 

“What is _that?”_

“It’s a cheese sandwich.”

“Baby! That is disgusting!” she exclaims — way too dramatically. “If I were there, I would be able to cook you a real dinner and you’d be healthy again in no time! I wonder if I should just book a flight and come up during a weekend — just to cook. Then we can freeze a month’s worth of food in your freezer and you can just defrost and bake it whenever you are hungry. I can keep doing this for you once every month!”

He thinks this is a fucking terrible-ass idea. He also thinks that he has repeatedly told this woman he cannot currently stand to eat stewed or wet things and she keeps forgetting this fact about him. It’s possible that he will never be able to eat stewed or wet things ever again — which is a fucking bummer because their cultural cuisine is full of wet and stewed things and he used to love it all. He doesn’t want his mom to fly up and make him food he can’t bring himself to eat and then get her fucking feelings hurt — _again —_ over it.

“Is Drogo a good cook?” his mom asks suddenly, which catches him a little off-guard.

He says, “I’m not going to make Drogo cook my food for me, Ma. He’s also like, _my boss._ That would be so weird.”

“He’s such a good boy, though. I bet he would make you dinner sometime if you just asked him to.”

“Yeah, I’m not going to ask him.” And then after a brief pause, as he thinks about it and anticipates, he says, “And don’t ask him to on my behalf, okay? Jesus, Mom. Hey, where is Dad?”

“Huh?”

“Where is Dad, by the way? Just curious.”

“In the living room. He’s reading.”

  
  
  


Missandei nearly gets bowled over by a blocky blur of short fur, and she blearily observes that the puppies have gotten _way_ big since she last saw them, an observation that results in Dany glowering vaguely in the dogs’ general direction. 

Dany’s apartment smells — not altogether disastrous like how Dany described it to Missy — but not altogether fresh, either. Dany’s place smells a little like dog breath and dog fur.

Dinner, which Missy carried over from a nearby takeout place, is chaotic because Daenerys spends half of it screaming at the dogs to be better behaved. Dinner consists of these life updates sprinkled in between stress-filled bites of curried rice. Dany tells Missy, for instance, that her life is in fucking shambles — she is a fucking powerless figurehead at work and Tywin Lannister begrudgingly installed his own daughter in Dany’s former post — so Dany gets to watch Cersei just fucking do Dany’s old job all fucking wrong — all day — and impotently just _take it_ because she might as well just fucking _kill herself._ Dany also tells Missy that she doesn’t have the time to network and put feelers out there for a new job that doesn’t fucking constantly humiliate her every fucking day — because these two fucking animals are ruining her life and it’s all her brother’s fault, so ha-ha, he finally accomplished one of his life’s goals, that fucker. Dany tells Missy about the copious amounts of research she has put into finding a home or sanctuary for the two shitty dogs, but there’s a critique or reason to be concerned with every place, from the conditions shown on a website versus the reported conditions shown in news articles or documentaries. It’s also near-impossible to give aggressive dogs with bite history to no-kill shelters because the goal of the shelter is to rehome dogs. It’s hard to rehome dogs that pose a danger to people. 

“And I read about this dog boarding school that you can send dogs to, to learn manners — but they have these baseline requirements like, uh, no history of aggression.” Dany is shaking her head. “What the fuck? So I’m supposed to be become a hermit and lock myself up with these dogs in my apartment for the rest of their lives, then?”

In response to this — because there has been a lot of manic information delivered in the last five minutes — Missandei does not even know what to say. So she just says, “Whoa.”

  
  
  


Compared to Daenerys, Missandei is not as knee-jerk opinionated or decisive. In advice-giving, Missandei tends to be thoughtful and pragmatic, good at laying out Dany’s options. How their friendship has generally worked in the past is that when Missandei had a conundrum, Dany would tell Missy the one correct course of action and then lay out the precise steps in order to carry it out as swiftly and as definitively as possible. And when Dany had a conundrum, Dany would generally have an idea of a course of action, and Missandei often served to gently affirm and empower the decision Dany has already made.  

This time, Dany has obsessed over all of her options — because this situation is so new to her and so perplexing so she has thought about it and researched a lot. She already knows all the points in Missy’s ongoing recap. Dany actually has to resist impatiently cutting Missandei off after Missandei repeats the third thing that Dany already knows about these dogs. 

Missy is carefully saying, “Maybe it’s a good idea to consult another veterinarian or a behaviorist and see what they think. After all, they are the experts.”

Dany waits for Missy to pause before she says, “Yeah, got it.”

And _that tone_ is enough for Missy’s hackles to raise, for her to be reminded of how uneven their friendship has become. 

Missy is not careful at all as she says, “And maybe euthanizing them is the right thing to do. Maybe you are resisting euthanisia because of your pride, because you created this reputation for yourself. Because no one dies on your watch, right? You can fix everything, right?”

Then, for a glorious moment, Dany is momentarily stunned — speechless even. She just looks at Missandei with her jaw dropped and her eyes kind of bulging. 

And then she recovers from the shock of it — by laughing. And by saying, “Okay, correction. _Many_ people have died on my watch.”

Missandei starts to laugh too, these slow chuckles that gradually pick up speed the longer she stares at Dany’s face. She says, “Oh my God, this isn’t funny at all. Why are we laughing? This is terrible.”

“Oh my God,” Dany says, turning a little bright in the face. “You really just _told me_ just now _. Wow.”_

 

  


For the rest of the night, things start to feel a little like old times and like they are back in college again — except they are both significantly older and this time they are both draped over Dany’s expensive, stained couch as Dany’s hand casually holds onto the paw of the sleeping boy dog. 

Missandei’s leg is swung over the back of the couch and she’s facing up at the ceiling as she tells Dany that Dany should just name the dogs already — she cannot call them boy dog and girl dog forever. 

In response to this, Dany tells Missy that naming them would mean that she intends to keep them. 

“It’s unfortunate they have a tendency of fear-biting,” Missandei muses to the ceiling. “Because they are both very sweet puppies when they are calm and feel safe.”

“So what’s going on with you and Grey?” Daenerys blurts, apropos of nothing — just because it’s been in the back of her mind. “Are you two . . . a thing?”

Missandei rolls over, pulling her leg off the back of couch so that she can more fully face Dany. “What’s going on with you and Daario?” she throws back, sounding quippy and fairly light about it, actually.

Dany frowns. “That was a bad error in judgement on my part. I feel bad that he’s like — so in love with me.” 

Dany then cracks a tiny smile as Missandei snorts out this laugh of disbelief. Dany is secretly relieved that these things are more out in the open, and she is secretly empowered to push for more from her friend. 

So she boldly asks, “Have you guys slept together yet?”

Missandei pulls in a big breath of air and sighs it out, as she looks at Daenerys and plainly says, “Nothing is going on with me and Grey. He doesn’t want to be together right now because he has some things to work through — or maybe he just doesn’t think I’m very hot or interesting.” Missy releases this enigmatic smile at this point, right before she says, “We _have_ slept together before, _many times.”_

For her honesty, Missy gets a couch cushion, shoved right into her face — as Dany sits up, startling the dogs, and starts looming over Missy’s flailing body, trying to fight her off. As she generally suffocates Missandei under the pillow, Dany says, “No way! No way! Oh my God! How was it! Was it good? It must’ve been _good,_ right? Otherwise why would you say _many times?_ Oh my God! What did you guys _do?_ How did you have sex?”

For the time being, Missandei keeps it classy. She skips over the play-by-play because it still bums her out to think about the sex that she and Grey used to have but are no longer having. Missy shoves Dany off of her and swipes the couch cushion to the ground, letting it bounce on the back of girl dog. 

Instead of focusing on the physical, Missandei leans on the emotional. She lets out another laugh, one that quickly transitions into listlessness, as she tells Dany, “I just want to _be with him_ — and I want to be there _for him._ It kills me every day that _I can’t._ I just keep thinking about how I didn’t believe in him, in Valyria, and how I sold him out. And I think that I deserve this, because I wasn’t good enough at loving him.”  

And in response to _this,_ Dany is like, “Wow.”

Which doesn’t bother Missandei. Presently, she doesn’t really need for Dany to present her with _the_ _solution_ to her problems. Instead, she asks, “Why didn’t you think it was a good idea for me to be with him — before?”

And Dany feels utterly stupid and inept, as she admits, “I didn’t want him to hurt you. I also didn’t want you to become close with him because you and I are close — and I didn’t want him to be a part of my life in that way — because . . . because of what happened with Bolton. I was ashamed. And I was being shitty.” 

  
  
  


Perhaps due to Sam’s very gently coaxing, Grey goes to a medical doctor without it being coerced into him as part of his job. He goes to a medical doctor on his own. 

Sam suggested that it would give him some peace of mind — to go to a practitioner outside of work, to hear what he will hear from a third party and to not worry that information about his health is being strategically held back or strategically delivered to him.

He is nervous and very anxious, over the timing of when he has to explain his body to this new medical professional. He lets the moment pass him by and feels like a real _idiot_ about it, as the nice medical assistant hands him a dressing gown and lets him know that he should get changed and that the doctor will be in soon.

His hands tremble a little bit and his pulse is jackhammering in his neck, as he quickly gets naked and quickly throws on the backless dressing gown. 

  
  
  


Though she knows there’s no point in comparing, she can’t help it. 

She is shocked to see how different Bettie is from her mom. Bettie is, in a terrible word, kind of plain. Where her mom was feminine and charismatic and was the center of attention because she was so freaking charming, Bettie is meek and quiet and a little cold. Missandei tries to remember her dad’s words of caution — that it can take Bettie a little while to warm up because she is so shy.

They keep describing one another as friends. Her dad introduces her to Bettie by saying that Bettie is his friend. Bettie keeps talking about how she is glad to have met such a good friend like Missandei’s father. They sit far apart from each other, with at least a foot of space separating the two of them on the other side of the booth.

All throughout lunch, Missy thinks about how terrible this could potentially be, when Moss and Mars meet Bettie. She thinks about how her ultra-confident cop brothers will respond to a quiet woman whose social anxiety exhibits through lack of eye contact and apparent lack of engagement — thus far, Missandei has asked all the questions. Thus far, Bettie has not asked her anything about herself.

She sneaks a look at her dad’s face — to check in — and she can see that he is massively uncomfortable right now. She tries to alleviate that by smiling brightly and by saying, “So, Bettie, what is your favorite book?” 

Bettie looks caught off guard — because of the social anxiety. Bettie says, “Oh! It’s hard to pick a favorite. There are so many books out there. It would depend on genre and type.”

“Oh, how about science fiction? Do you have a favorite sci-fi book?”

“I don’t read science fiction.”

“Oh, okay,” Missandei says easily. “I brought it up because I’m working through this crazy novel about an ebola outbreak that results in nuclear war. It’s bananas and highly unrealistic. But that’s the kind of sci-fi that I like!”

“Oh, interesting,” Bettie says, twisting her gaze to the far wall.

  
  
  


He doesn’t know what his problem is because he’s always been very much loved by his parents — but assurances and niceties make him feel very uncomfortable and self-conscious.

His new doctor, a referral from Sam, is very nice, has a very soothing voice, and is full of positive affirmations. 

He’s dressed in his clothes again as Dr. Aemon tells him that his body looks great. Grey most assuredly does not think his body looks great and conveys as much through his facial expression. So Dr. Aemon lowers his voice and gently tells Grey that the blood test will reveal more information soon enough. 

“Your blood pressure looks good, though. You’re a little underweight, but you already know that. You don’t smoke. You don’t drink very much. You exercise regularly. Beyond injury scars, I see a very healthy young man. You should be proud of yourself.”

  
  
  


Ten minutes before the staff meeting starts, before Selmy has arrived, he sits quietly in his seat and sneaks looks at Missandei because he hasn’t seen her in four days — two of the days were weekend days and the other two were just because they weren’t scheduled to work together. He secretly watches her animatedly talking to Kojja and Alayaya at the pastry box near the door. 

He’s eavesdropping a little bit, so he can hear Alayaya gripe about carbs right before she shoves half of a croissant into her mouth. He listens as Missandei tells them about her dad’s new girlfriend — how she just doesn’t get what her dad sees in the woman, but also how she’s trying to keep an open mind. He listens as she struggles to explain this woman because she’s trying so hard not to use insulting words or rely on superficialities — and her faltering efforts make him smile to himself because he thinks she is endearing. 

He’s knocked out of his daze when Selmy unceremoniously walks into the conference room and tells them, “The bill was just passed minutes ago. It will be signed into law next Tuesday. Drogo — please ramp up and prep your team for seizure. Grey — you’ll be running point on this, yes?”

Grey’s honesty kick has permeated many facets of his life. In front of everyone, he actually blurts out, “Me? I was only _just_ cleared to go back into the field. You really want me to lead this?”

In response, Selmy volleys back with, “Do you _want_ to run point? Do you think you are able to?”

And, still dazed and bewildered, Grey honestly says, “Yeah, I want to. And I can.”

  
  
  



	56. Grey is a leader again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In a bizarre turn of events, Grey constantly doubts himself as everyone around him believes in him so much. The future love of his life gets put on the A-Team and she is SHOCKED, I tell you! Shocked! She spends some time at the shooting range to ensure she doesn't almost accidentally shoot her babe again. And then at the airport, she reminds Grey of his impending future.

  
  


  
  
  


Grey observes to Sam that life is weird and unfolds counterintuitively sometimes. When he was desperate to prove that he was completely sane and ready to work after he was tortured for days and got his dick chopped off by a psychopath, everyone around him was like, ‘No, you are totally not fucking okay,’ and then blocked him from living his life to the fullest.

However, now, with him apprehensive and unsure of whether he is ready to work and ready to take on various responsibilities again because he was tortured and thought he was left to die in a foreign country — everyone in his life is treating him like he is completely sane and completely capable. They are conveying such a  _ belief  _ in him — everything has just flipped. 

“What if I’m not ready for this?” he asks Sam, sitting on Sam’s couch in Sam’s office, leaning forward to get a look at Sam’s eyes, to ensure that he doesn’t see placating lies in them. “What if I lead the team, and then we all die? Or I lead the team, we get captured, more than half of us dies, and then the remainder of us just get our dicks cut off?”

“Do you really think there is a good chance that could happen in this particular instance?” Sam asks.  

Grey sighs. He kind of reluctantly says, “No, not according to our risk assessment. The assessment for this is low.”

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“Yeah, doc,” Grey says, a little pointedly. “Low risk means it’s good.”

Sam gives him a slight smile. Sam says, “You’ll have to forgive me. I don’t have any field training.”

“Bullshit,” Grey grumbles. “You’re just saying things so I can say things back to you and realize how  _ ridiculous _ I sound. I know your game, Sam.”

“What was the risk assessment for the Bolton engagement. Do you remember?”

Grey nods. “It was moderately high. Selmy didn’t want to sign off on it. Daenerys pushed him to because she was getting pressure from up above and needed the departmental win. I wanted to be  _ heroic _ and so I said that I would personally lead the team myself, to reduce potential for missteps.” Grey waves his hand, forcefully maintaining his blase attitude and blase tone of voice. “And you already know the rest of how  _ that fucking shitshow  _ went down.” __

  
  
  
  
  
  


He tries not to be self-indulgent and crowdsource opinions on what he should do. He doesn’t want to go around spilling his insecurities to Kojja or Alayaya or Yara. He already burdens Drogo enough. 

In any case, those in his immediate sphere are frustratingly black and white about these things. And if Selmy were to get another whiff of his reticence, Selmy would probably pull him completely off the team. This is why he keeps his mouth shut about it around the big boss. 

When he casually mentions to Drogo on their off-time, while they are hanging out in Grey’s apartment after work, that he’s not sure if he is ready to work at this capacity just yet, Drogo drops a trite cliche and tells Grey, “Only you know the answer, bud. Only you know if you are ready.”

So Grey moves forward with the motions of being ready — with the details and scheduling and the plans as Drogo works on securing the search warrant. They have less than a week to prepare and get all the pieces in place so that this sticks, legally. 

He, Drogo, and Selmy meet with leadership — with Tywin, Cersei, Jon, and Olenna. The meeting is frustratingly oblique, with particular focus paid to resources — a stress point for Selmy — and particular focus paid to the safety of personnel — probably a dig at Grey. Tywin asks him if he is prepared or has any concerns. 

He faithfully lies a little bit. He says that he is prepared and that he has few concerns. He talks to them as if he doesn’t remember what it was like to have this exact conversation nearly four years ago. He also talks to them as if they didn’t all complacently debate over whether it was too expensive to get him back from the Valyrians before Daenerys took the decision out of their hands.

So he makes quick work of his job. For days after the decision is made, he lives, eats, and breathes work. 

And once he sees Drogo’s proposed roster sheet and sees who is missing from it, he ends up pushing for her — with Drogo, who gets to make the final call on the team members. 

Grey  _ does _ feel a little nauseous over it because if they are all going to die, he doesn’t want her to die along with them. But he also tells himself that if they are going to die anyway, she has just as much right to die along with them as anybody else.

He tries to override his paranoid worry with this mantra in his head. He tells himself that she has earned this — she has worked for an entire year for this — maybe her entire career — and he cannot take it away from her because he misguidedly thinks he has the responsibility to shelter and protect her. He reminds himself of all of the times she has confided in him and shared with him her professional desires and her frustration with the pervasive systemic difficulties of being a woman in this job.

So in Drogo’s office, with the door closed, Grey says to Drogo, “I want to put Missandei on this team.”

Drogo’s face is pointed down at paperwork, as he carelessly responds back with, “Bud, that girl is clearly obsessed with you. You don’t have to do this to get in good with her. You’ve already got in good with her.”

Drogo knows it’s completely the wrong joke to make — the wrong thing to say — the second it leaves his mouth. Drogo looks up. He starts to say, “Bud —”

“Please don’t talk to me like I’m stupidly putting my people at greater risk because I think a woman I work with is cute,” Grey cuts in, his eyes bland and dead. “That’s not why, and fuck you for saying what you just said. She’s  _ earned _ this. She’s worked harder on this than anyone else. She would be an asset to the team. It’s just the right thing to do.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She learns she’s going to be part of the raid when Drogo yells at her from across the room and demands to know why the fuck she is dawdling in the break room with a fucking cupcake when their meeting is slated to start in fucking five minutes. 

She freezes mid-bite, half-eaten pink mini cupcake unpeeled and in her hand. And then, rather than get touchy about getting yelled at by her boss because she fucking  _ didn’t _ read her boss’ freaking  _ mind _ , these random pieces of information snap together in her brain, and she ecstatically spikes the rest of the cupcake into her mouth before she positively runs out of the room and forgets to immediately text her dad to tell him that she’s not going to make their Friday date night in front of the TV.

She sees a bunch of eyes scan in her direction when she arrives in the meeting room — the last one to. She sees Sandor mildly raise his brows upon seeing her. She sees Daario’s light interest. She sees Robb’s automatic smile. She sees Brienne straighten up in her seat. She sees Tal swivel in his chair. And she sees Grey’s blank face.

“Sit your ass down,” Drogo grumbles at her gruffly. “Jesus Christ.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She constantly doubts herself so she struggles to understand and to keep up because this is the very first time she is experiencing this. She is self-conscious and scared of getting kicked off. So for those three hours in the conference room, she says very little in hopes of not revealing that she is potentially painfully out of her depth. 

The others all use jargon. They also silently settle on procedure. More than half of them in the room have a military background, a fact readily apparent through their shorthand with one another. 

She constantly wonders  _ when _ she should speak up and admit to them that she is probably a liability and for the sake of the operation, she probably should just stay the fuck home and out of their way.  

She actually doesn’t have to take it upon herself to speak up. Her underqualification gets subtly brought up — naturally by Sandor, who doesn’t dislike her at all, but who is brusquely pragmatic. 

He suspects she doesn’t understand what she should be looking at, when they are shown a map of the complex on the screen. He isn’t actively trying to embarrass her, but he also doesn’t want to fucking die because of a fuck up, so calls out his doubts by saying, “Missandei, do you even know how entry is conducted?”  

All eyes expectantly fall onto her. She feels scrutinized.

She feels her cheeks going warm. She starts to nervously stress out. The doubts start to worm their way through her brain. She starts to flail, and it’s a struggle to talk.

And then she catches a glimpse of his face — just this blur as she sweats. 

Then she starts to feel a little self-righteous and indignant. Then, she starts remembering the hours and hours of lessons that Grey used to give her as they staked out massage parlors — and she remembers sometimes getting frustrated at how overly picky and overly demanding he was. She remembers joking around with him and telling him that not every forgotten detail results in freaking death.

She feels ashamed over that now. 

So she says, “Depends on our assignments — who covers the back, who forces entry at the door. Once the door is breached, we search the premises systematically according to Grey’s directives. Each of us will probably take a room for the search. Tal is our finder and will seize and catalog all evidence and — do you need me to keep going?”

She looks up and glances at Grey on her way to staring back at Sandor, with her face hot and her heart pounding in her chest. 

In the corner of her eye, she sees Grey covering half of his face, covering a proud smile, with his hand over his mouth. 

Next to her, Drogo snorts, slapping his hand down on the table. He is secretly pleased, relieved, and impressed. He cannot give her any props in public in front of her colleagues though. That’s not his MO. 

Instead, he says, “What do y’all want for dinner?” as he swipes up his phone from the table. “Imma have Pod go fetch us food.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She actually wants to eat a sensible dinner — like a salad or a protein on whole wheat toast — but they end up ordering a greasy pizza after Drogo shoots down all of their suggestions and makes the call for pizza to a table full of groans. Daario tells Drogo that he doesn’t want to have diarrhea later tonight because he might be a little lactose intolerant now. Drogo barks at all of them to just shut the fuck up — and then he makes Pod drive out to go fetch pizza. Pod is not on the team. Pod is just on standby to do chores like go fetch them pizza and refill their waters or sodas when glasses are empty.

In the time that Pod is gone, they socialize for a quick half-hour as they wait for dinner to arrive. In that time, she remembers to text her dad, who is used enough to cancelled or amended plans that he does not seem offended that she kind of stood him up. 

In that half an hour, Grey makes a personal phone call in the corner, showing his back to them as he speaks in a quiet, gentle tone — the specifics of his conversation indecipherable. 

They all do hear him say, “I love you, too,” pretty clearly, before he hangs up. 

Tal burps after he empties his soda can. He leans back in his chair severely and says, “Hey, you steppin’ out?” as he casts a quick look to Missy. “That’s _ bold, _ Nudho.”

“I was talking to my  _ mother,”  _ Grey says pointedly.

“Why do you talk to your mom like she’s your  _ girl?” _ Tal throws back, pretending to be confused. 

The rest of the room lightly chuckles.

“That’s just how a kid talks to a mother who loves her kid,” Grey snipes back. “You don’t know what this sounds like because your shitty mom gave you up because she didn’t want you.”

“Oh my God,” Robb mutters, covering his eyes — at the same time Sandor is snickering and Tal is laughing out his delighted surprise at Grey’s new-old bite. “That’s so harsh, Grey,” Robb says.

“Robbie’s mommy loves him, too,” Tal offers.

“So does Drogo’s mom!” Robb accuses.

“I don’t know why we are saying this like it’s a bad thing,” Daario offers. “My mom loves me, too. I love that she loves me.”

“Missandei, does your mommy love you, too?” Tal inquires, trying to include her in their banter.

“Her mom is dead,” Grey interjects, crossing his arms.

And, as all of them recoil from just how  _ harsh _ he currently sounds, Brienne helpfully pipes in with, “My mom’s dead, too!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She logs in a lot of hours at the shooting range over the next few days. She logs in the hours because Drogo got the warrant, their flights are booked, and as the date of the raid nears, the nervous dread in the pit of her stomach grows and grows. 

She hasn’t been sleeping well. Her mind keeps flashing back to the moment Grey touched his bleeding stomach and told her that he has lost a lot of blood. Her mind keeps flashing back to his poor naked body all slashed up and displaying all of this evidence of how fucking unfair life is. She keeps remembering his labored breathing and him weakly passing out and slipping out of her grasp. She keeps remembering his hands on her face, wiping at her tears as she sobbed and as he said goodbye to her. 

She keeps thinking that none of it would have happened in the same shitty kind of way if she had just been a better shot, if she had been more accurate. Maybe she could’ve killed the racist Valyrian, and he never would have been able to falsely identify Grey as the mass killer. Then Grey never would have had to give himself up. They could’ve just walked into the embassy. They could’ve both gone home at the same time. Maybe they’d even be together right now and in a relationship — if she hadn’t fucking shot him.

Her marksmanship has always been pretty solid. When she isn’t panicked, she is pretty accurate. It’s hard to replicate the immense pressure of an emergency situation. 

He has taught her that she can best prepare by training her muscles to work without an active push from the brain. She just has to practice and practice so that it feels instinctual and second nature.  

  
  
  
  
  
  


The last time she went on a work trip, she didn’t come home as scheduled. For this reason, this time, she texts both of her brothers and tells them that she loves them very much. She tells them that she hopes her nieces and nephews know how much their aunt loves them. She writes Dany an email and keeps it short. She just says that they should grab dinner again, when Missy gets back from her trip.

She doesn’t want to say any of this vague affectionate stuff to their faces because maybe she’s a little superstitious and she doesn’t want to jinx this by being a little too ceremonial about it.

She gets up from bed extra early for her flight, because she feels restless. She sits at the kitchen table with her dad as he reads the paper quietly. He knows as much about her trip as he can know. He has surmised that it’s significant. He has figured out that it is potentially dangerous. He has been wondering what he did to deserve three kids in law enforcement.

She’s jittery without the coffee. She has packed light. There’s just a duffle bag over her shoulder when they hear the knock at the front door.

Her dad gets there first — she’s rinsing her coffee cup at the sink. She hears her dad’s low voice in the foyer say, “Good morning, son. It’s good to see you again.”

She hears Grey say, “Hello, sir. It’s good to see you again, too. How are you?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Their hands graze as she transfers her bag over to him, so that he can toss it into the trunk of the car. She ducks into the passenger seat as the car rattles from him shutting the door. She feels a sense of dread and maybe of regret. She absently wonders if they are really doing this out of a sense of duty-fulfilling — if they are doing this because of a misguided sense of making things right instead of what they should actually be doing. And that is running the fuck away together and just living out the rest of their lives in safe obscurity somewhere — together. She wonders if it’s pride that is driving this march towards death.

The drive to the airport is largely silent. His hands are clenched around the steering wheel as he repetitively recites procedure back to himself over and over again. He doesn’t dare tell himself that this time is going to be different. He doesn’t dare allow that thought to even manifest. He just thinks about the time they will land, the weapons they need to secure, and the safe house they need to transport their team to. Then, he will worry about tomorrow.

She is similarly preoccupied with procedure. Her role in it all is comparatively small, but the pressure she puts on herself is disproportionate to her role. She abstractly worries she will be the death of them all because over the course of her short career in the field, she has fucked up far more than she has nailed it.

She touches his forearm to get his attention when he slows the car down, pulling into the parking spot. He puts the car into park — and then glances at her out of the side of his eye.

She looks at him straight on, right in the eyes. She thinks that this fucking  _ sucks.  _ She also fears that maybe this is their last moment of peace together, too. The last time this happened, they were stupidly and pointedly in a petty fight with one another, so they gave each other a big threshold. Last time, she didn’t think to say something meaningful to him — just in case it was her last opportunity to.

So now, softly, she says, “Grey, I know this is going to go off without a hitch. I  _ know _ we’re going to be fine. Still — I want to tell you again that I love you. So much. And I trust you implicitly.”

She can see him briefly shut his eyes. She can see him struggle internally with her statement. She knows that he wishes she’d just leave it alone. She can see the ever-changing miasma of emotions flicker across his face. 

And finally, in response, he quietly says, “Thank you.”

  
  
  
  
  



	57. Grey is terrified

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the eve of something big, Grey constantly wars with self-doubt and fears that he's not good enough to keep his people alive. His people do not even give a shit about his fears. His people are more preoccupied with cracking a few jokes at his expense though. The future love of his life fucks him over in Rock, Paper, Scissors. But it's cool, maybe it will all be moot cuz maybe they'll all be dead tomorrow?

  
  
  


 

He is so fucking scared. 

And as someone who is generally pretty cool with his own mortality and his own inevitable death, he is not accustomed to being so scared. He is not scared for himself, but for everyone else around him. 

They had to pull this together in a really fucking short amount of time, even though they all knew it was a possibility and had been talking about it and prepping for it, for months. Even then, it still felt so short.

That’s all he thinks about on the long commercial flight. He worries that he is fucked every which way. In the past, he got fucked from an excess of confidence. In the past, he got fucked from lack of preparation. In the past, he got fucked because he made himself come across too untrustworthy. This time, he worries about  _ all of those things —  _ along with this meta-fear. He also fears the volume of his fear will compound and fuck them all up because his nerves are making him incompetent. 

He worries that his fears are apparent and that it will infect the team. He worries that his team will take cues from him, and they will start to doubt, too. Conversely, he also worries about hiding himself too much. He worries that if he’s not completely honest with them and pushes ahead with too much bravado — he worries about they will all die  _ again.  _ And if not death, he worries his lack of transparency will erode trust.

He also excessively worries about her — on top of worrying about his parents, who are only  _ just _ getting the fuck past the last and first times shit went down. He worries his parents can’t take another hit. He worries he’s going to steal her from the world. He worries that he has made the wrong decision in pushing her to be here. He worries that he keeps making _ all the fucking wrong decisions _ when it comes to her, because everything having to do with her and how he feels about her muddles up these decisions that would otherwise contain much more clarity. If he didn’t know so much about who she is as a person, he doesn’t think he’d put her on this team. He would probably think she’s under-experienced. He would probably also use her misjudgments in Valyria as knocks against her being on this team.

His mind sometimes screams out  _ why _ she is on this team. He worries — for the millionth time since he has known her intimately — that his fucking feelings for her is going to result in the death of them all. He knows that everyone, especially her, fucking thinks he is overstating this — but he is not —  _ he is not. _

“Baby,” Drogo says to him as they wait outside the airport, going soft with his voice at the same time he pops Grey on the butt with a sharp, stinging slap, right as Drogo hooks his own heavy bag over his shoulder. “Car’s gonna be here in about six minutes. I really need to take a fucking shit. You too, huh?”

This actually makes Grey smile — a little bit. Which, he supposes, is Drogo’s intention. He often forgets that Drogo has the capacity to be ultra perceptive sometimes. 

He leans over and briefly squeezes the back of Drogo’s neck, digging his thumb into Drogo’s carotid artery, making Drogo twinge his body — as his own hammering heart starts to ease up and slow down just a little bit. He says, “Maybe.”

“You are first — so you can go first,” Drogo says to him. 

“Oh my God,” Tal says in deadpan, breaking into their moment, dropping his own bag at his feet. “The TK show has started. It’s been a minute. I forgot how fucking annoying this shit is to watch. Other people need to shit, too, you know?”

“Fucking jealous,” Drogo mutters, as his hand starts to palm at his own chest. Drogo is unconsciously searching for a pack of cigarettes that isn’t there. He is stressed out about this, too. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


It was a joke, and he doesn’t get to shit first at all. 

He actually splits off with Daario to grab munitions as the rest of the team heads to the safe house. 

On the way to the compound, Daario blithely talks to him about how this hot weather is just making Daario itch to go back on his boat. Daario says that they should get together and chill on the boat to celebrate once they get back to King’s Landing.

He doesn’t think Daario’s optimism is forced or designed — like Drogo’s is. He thinks that Daario is just being Daario — and that is blessedly a relief to Grey at this moment. 

Their government contact in New Ghis is a stocky man who speaks in heavily accented Common Tongue. He is very process-oriented and runs through every page of paperwork with Grey before he walks them to the back room to show them the weapons and equipment that they shipped over days ago on a military cargo flight. Daario starts looking over surveillance equipment right away — this is actually their backup — a rental. Their own equipment is in another box.

Grey starts to quietly count and inventory everything. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Thus far, she has been very surprised by how relaxed and how casual everyone is with one another. She’s been surprised at how many observational jokes Tal cracks — like about how their driver smelled like onions and how it’s kind of nice and made Tal hungry. She’s been surprised at how many times Robb is just freaking asking people about their lives, like what their weekend plans are and what kind of relationship they have with their siblings. She has been surprised at how Drogo — their second on this engagement — just heads to the fridge, grabs a bunch of foreign beer cans, and just starts cracking them open before handing them out.

He even hands her one — with a smile.

Missy generally hovers near Brienne, probably because Brie is also a woman in a roomful of alpha men. 

Even the way the guys treat and talk to Brienne though — like Brienne is one of them — is wild to Missy. 

She has repeatedly observed to herself that she has become very, very accustomed to Grey’s working style and kind of assumed that everyone else is also head-down, very professional, very somber and focused and quiet. She doesn’t really know how to blend into this boisterous kind of time-killing — this camaraderie. 

“M,” Drogo suddenly says to her, as Sandor twists in place and cracks his own back. “Sit down. You are giving me anxiety, with the way you are standing there, holding your beer like it’s a bomb.”

“You know why M’s like that, right?” Tal breaks in, talking to the others, already laughing at the statement that he’s rolling around in his head. “Y’all know why our girl is scared of breathing wrong, right?” He then turns back to her and gives her a charming and not altogether unkind smile. 

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sandor mutters sarcastically. “It couldn’t have been the time she got gunned down in Valyria and then had to leave her partner behind, could it?” 

“Nah, S,” Tal says, waving off Sandor. “She was full of nerves even before that brush with death. I’d know. She taught me, B, and G Naathi. She’d be all like, ‘Oh, so the past tense of this word is  _ this,  _ and G would be like, ‘Nah, no it’s not.’ And she’d be like, ‘Oh my God, am I wrong?’ like she forgot she is fluent and that G is just a fucking asshole sometimes.” 

Robb holds his beer can as he points a finger to her. He explains, “It can be hard working with G,” like she doesn’t already know this.

“It’s  _ so hard!” _ Tal exclaims. 

Drogo is sitting on the couch and leaning on his elbows as he chuckles through his sip. He is also muttering, “He and Lil’ D are on their way back so y’all got about, um, twenty more minutes to get the G-bashing out of your system. You know, before he gets here and makes us do a billion and a half dry-runs. With our  _ minds.” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey sees evidence of them drinking — empty beer cans — when he gets back with Daario. He doesn’t comment on that. He just gestures to Sandor and Brienne and walks out the door with them to unload their equipment and weapons. 

When Tal sees it all, Tal actually belies all of the trash-talking that he was doing, just  _ minutes  _ ago. He gets up from his seat right away, deposits his empty can in the nearest waste bin, and then starts wordlessly pulling stuff out of Grey’s arms and organizing them on the floor of the living room of their safe house. Tal sweeps a sheet off the top of the box after unlidding it, uncaps a pen from his pocket, and starts double-checking Grey’s counts on everything before signing off at the bottom.

“Count this, please,” Grey says quietly to her, as he hands her a box of ammo. “And then give it to T to count again.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey actually just asks them if they could run through tomorrow’s procedure a few more times — to try to spot any potential kinks or hiccups. They all just readily agree to this, and they all scrape some chairs — both real and makeshift — to the small round table that isn’t large enough to fit all of them comfortably. 

Her chest is pressed against Daario’s arm as she presses forward to get her face at the table. She leans on Daario as they all verbally talk through the run-of-show for tomorrow. They go through it down to the second. Brienne is running a clock on her phone, timing it and writing notes of points-of-drag down for Grey, which he looks over, talks out with them before soliciting suggestions from them for optimization. 

They do this for a few hours. And by close to the last run-through, it’s kind of like a symphony — she can do it with her eyes shut and her ears deaf. She doesn’t have to get cues from the others to know when and where she slots into things. She understands that this is where he wanted them to get to. 

Grey then says, “Wanna break for dinner? You guys hungry?”

And it’s actually Tal who demurely says, “You wanna run through it one more time, sir?” which is a small slip up. They are not supposed to refer to him in a way that reveals rank. “Just to be really sure?” Tal adds. “I could use another run.”

Grey looks expectantly around the table. He asks, “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Drogo’s voice is a dark rumble. “Let’s go again.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Drogo vigorously chews on nicotine gum and fights back slight nausea in the pit of his stomach — very normal — as he pulls together food for the team at the stove. Tal wanted to cook — and Tal usually cooks — but Drogo told the guy to scram because Drogo was going to take care of dinner. He just wants to make a dinner that is palatable to Grey, without calling a bunch of fucking attention to the fact that Grey is struggling with food. In Drogo’s mind, it’s not a big fucking deal, and it’s nobody’s business.

When he hands out crispy sandwiches to everyone — after he puts up with Daario insulting his cooking ability, which is actually mighty and great — he saves the plain cheese one for Grey, who carefully cuts his eyes up to Drogo’s before taking the slices. 

Sandor inhales his food, washing it down with the frothy contents of light beer before he crushes the can in his fist and throws it accurately into the bin. He stands up and announces that he’d like to take a walk. He looks down at Brienne expectantly — because they practice the buddy system always. They are never alone. Brienne is his walking buddy because she is similarly introverted and enjoys walking.  

She says, “Yeah, give me a second,” as she pushes herself to her feet with help from Sandor’s hand. “I need to pee first.

After the toilet flushes and Brienne walks back out wiping her hands on the seat of her pants, after Sandor waits for her to check her weapon and expectantly holds the door open for her — Robb watches them leave and walk away from the house — through the window. He is ensuring that nothing looks off for as long as he can see them. 

And then, in pretty typical Robb fashion, he just comes out and asks, “G, are you nervous about tomorrow?”

Grey sighs. And then he says, “Yeah.” 

Robb takes in the information in stride. Because he isn’t at all alarmed by it. “It’ll be fine,” he says reassuringly. “It’s different this time. It already feels different.”

There is a pause after that statement — as the rest of them watch Grey’s face and look for more traces of anxiety — as the rest of them try to work over whether it’s  _ too much  _ anxiety and whether they need to talk about role shuffling on the team. 

Grey clenches his jaw — they all see muscle on his jawline twitch. Then he sighs again. Then he says, “Yeah, that’s what I keep telling myself."

Grey is actually sure he’s about to fucking get shit-canned by his team in the next moment because they all want to live and not like, fucking  _ die _ . He knows what they must be seeing when they look at him. He fucking sees it, too. This is why he is sighing so much.

Drogo is first to break the pensiveness. Drogo actually says, “We completely trust you.”

“We’d follow you anywhere,” Daario eagerly adds.

“Always,” Tal says, before hearing the teeniest bit of overcompensation in his voice. So he corrects. “Well, not always. The future would depend on a lot of factors.

Grey nods — as the doubt continues battling inside of him. He doesn’t know what he has done to deserve this. He doesn’t think that he has earned this. He is still very, very scared for all of them. 

He still says, “Thanks.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Their day will start very early, so they all attempt to go to bed early. Sleep is comparatively easier for Robb and Sandor, who tend to bunk up together for this reason. They are heavy sleepers, and they also snore, the effects of which are minimized when they co-sleep.

As always, Daario and Tal bunk down together. There are not enough rooms for all of them to just double up, so Brienne gets to make a choice and she chooses to sleep on Daario and Tal’s floor after losing at rock-paper-scissors twice in a row. 

“Oh, awesome, you’re with us,” Drogo sarcastically says to Missandei. And then he snickers and nudges her in the arm. He says, “Just kidding. Let’s go get cozy together.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Drogo tries to be chivalrous and tries to just give her the spot on the bed with Grey, but she completely rejects his chivalry by pushing back, but not hard enough that it is potentially annoying to him. 

He rolls his eyes at her and loosely forms his hand into a fist, holding it on top of his palm. He expectantly waits for her to do the same.

In the end, Grey loses rock, paper, scissors —  _ twice. _ He goes paper to Missandei’s scissors. He goes paper  _ again _ to Drogo’s scissors, trying out a technique that Drogo kind of anticipated. 

Grey pretty much gets the short straw — and she just feels terrible and  _ horrified, _ that the result of her annoying-ass feminism is that Grey has to sleep on the floor while she gets the cush bed with the lite-misogynist.

Grey tiredly laughs as he faces her, lightly touches his own shoulder. He says, “It’s fine. I sleep fine anywhere.” 

They both think about their relationship in this moment. They both realize — at the same time — that this is an awkward way for her to relearn this information about him. In the entirely of their relationship, he didn’t once allow for them to actually  _ sleep _ together. They just had sex and then he just kicked her out of his apartment all the time. 

In response to this reminder, Grey just quietly feels shitty about it because he’s been in the mode of feeling shitty all day. In response to this reminder, she quietly just  _ misses him  _ and his presence in her personal life.

Either Drogo picks up on the energy or he doesn’t. He still has impeccable timing. He just throws back the blanket on the bed and says, “He’s not kidding. One time, he slept on the edge of a fucking mountain like a rock — as I stress-panicked all night, worried that if I fell asleep, I’d wake up alone and would have to climb down the mountain to retrieve his smashed body at the bottom.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


This time, with no extreme mountainous height to contend with and a fair bit of beer in his belly, Drogo falls asleep quickly. She can hear his even breathing and his surprisingly quiet snoring next to her. 

She has rolled over to the very edge of the bed, because she is uptight and doesn’t want to accidentally touch her boss in the middle of the night. It’s been many years since she’s co-slept in a bed with anyone she wasn't also having sex with. She doesn’t really know if she tosses and turns in her sleep. It would be embarrassing if she accidentally socked Drogo in the face in her sleep.  

She worries she’s not going to sleep at all tonight.

Then she hears him clear his throat — from underneath her — on the floor. Then she hears the bed skirt lightly rustle. 

She hears him very, very softly say her name — careful not to wake her, just in case she is sleeping.

She hears, “Missandei,” coming out as a whisper, from the floor — even though he’s not supposed to say her name. 

She whispers back. She says, “Yes?”

“How are you doing with all of this?” he asks quietly. “Are you okay?”

She starts to tear up — right away — because she is just so convinced that every terrible thing that has happened to him so far in his life is so unfair. She starts to tear up because he still manages to be so kind so thoughtful and so pure — even though he has every reason to be bitter and destructively angry. She tears up because she still is marveling that they are  _ here,  _ and that he is  _ here  _ and is still unsafe and didn’t just say fuck it and just leave all of this terribleness behind.  

And then the tears transition to just earnest, silent crying. 

She drops her arm off the edge of the bed. She starts to blindly palm around in the dark because she doesn’t currently give a fuck. She ends up getting his face — skimming the warm skin of his cheek.

In response to that, he raises up a hand and finds hers in the dark pretty easily.

They intertwine their fingers together — awkwardly positioned — but to her, it feels  _ so nice.  _ She rolls fully over and tries to cries silently into the mattress. 

The tone of her voice betrays her — because she sounds all choked up — as she says, “I’m okay.”

She feels him squeeze her hand — really firmly. 

He largely ignores the crying — because it sucks, and he can’t do much about it. 

After a pause, she hears him say, “Well, if you’re not — if you want to back out and just go home — you can do that. I have a contingency plan.” It takes her a second to realize that he is kind of joking — but he is also kind of serious.

“Oh, really?” she says softly, trying to lift the tone of her voice up for his sake. “Of course you have a contingency plan for something that is never going to happen.” She is also kind of joking and being serious all at once.

And, like a lunatic, she starts to entertain the idea of just climbing off the bed and putting herself down on the floor next to him. She starts to think that it doesn’t fucking matter right now — and if they are going to die tomorrow, she’d like to spend whatever time she has left with this person that she loves. 

But then he says something that gets her crying again. He says, “I sometimes think that  _ this _ was one of the mistakes I made last time, with us. I didn’t give you an out, and so the both of us got trapped there.”

“I’m not leaving you,” she firmly says back to him — right away. “And last time, we got trapped there because of me. It was my fault.”

“No, it was mine.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They all get up early because of the time difference. They all know they are going to fight jet lag today. 

They get up and hold hot cups of coffee that Tal made in their hands, as half of them huddle around a laptop watching the screen and the other half of them just listen to the laptop from their various posts around the safe house. They are waiting for the bill to get signed into law.

After Grey gets off the line with Jojen — after getting an update on Jojen’s team back in King’s Landing — Grey tepidly says that they are probably still a couple hours out. 

So they all get up and lightly clean up. They all sync their watches together. Then they start climbing into their vehicles. 

  
  
  


 

 

 


	58. Grey's team executes an arrest warrant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey apprehensively sends his team into a potential lion's den. It's very scary for him. His team is not that scared because all their leader ever does is exemplify competence. Missandei maybe sees the light at the end of the tunnel, FINALLY, and maybe considers that her life legit has purpose. An old enemy makes an appearance and says some damning words to Grey that will, for sure, mess with his mind in future episodes.

  
  
  
  
  
  


They meet with the local bureau’s personnel, comprising the outer perimeter team, the breach team, additional members of the surveillance team, the evidence response team, the subject transport team, the evidence photographer, public affairs — with point being an officer Grey has worked with once before.

It’s still hard to see outside — the sky only turning a touch pink as Grey firmly shakes hands with Mago, who he has been conferring with over the line the last few days. 

Daario connects with the rest of the surveillance team, going over procedure and equipment, finding nothing too out of the ordinary, but momentarily thrown when one of the team members tells him that there’s an incompatibility between the local equipment and the Western equipment that was shipped over from King’s Landing. He’s told they're procuring an adapter at the moment, and he more or less accepts it at face value as he excuses himself and connects his line to Jojen, to make Jojen aware of this.

Tal meets with the evidence team, including the photographer. He goes over the chain of custody with them, both in the Common Tongue and again in High Valyrian — to ensure they’re all on the same page. 

Drogo and Robb meet with the outer perimeter team. Brienne meets with the subject transport team. Sandor meets with the breach team.

And Missandei doesn’t even bother feeling self-conscious over her comparative lack of contribution. She doesn’t bother wondering which valuable spot on the team she has supplanted. She just notes that there are others patiently waiting who are not meeting at the moment — such as the crisis negotiator. She imagines that contingency personnel don’t have to be as integrated. 

The rest of her team trickles back in together after about 40 minutes. Drogo, apparently having spat it out somewhere, is no longer chewing his nicotine gum. Grey has his attention divided, between his people on the ground and the remote team in his ear. Jojen is giving him the play by play.

  
  
  
  
  
  


The drive to the house takes nearly an entire hour partly due to the sleepy but growing hustle and bustle of morning traffic. The other aspect of it is that Baelish lives in a remote and gated area of New Ghis. 

The cars travel these winding roads at 30 miles an hour — which is why it takes nearly an hour to travel to a property that is only 20 minutes away. 

The drive affords Grey time to live in his head. He rolls over procedure and run-of-show repeatedly, creating imagined problems for himself to solve. He thinks about how run-of-show would change if Baelish had an armed guard. He thinks about how it would change if there were two armed guards, then three, then four. He thinks about how his plans would change if the entire property was full of armed guards. He thinks about what he would do if they weren’t just any hire, but specialized hires — if they were Company agents again, for instance. He thinks about the touchpoints he needs to oversee to ensure the safety of his people. He thinks about how he’d need to adjust if Baelish tried to flee. He thinks about what needs to be done in order to prevent evidence tampering. He thinks about the language difference and cultural difference maybe affecting how they communicate with each other on the ground — he momentarily entertains the idea of speaking in High Valyrian — but he immediately vetoes that in himself. It’s a really stupid idea. They are all trained in the Common Tongue. 

He still carefully thinks about the words he will use to be as clear as possible in communication when they are on the ground.

Underneath the litany of his work process, Grey fights to suppress the memories of his past failures. He knows thinking about them right now will fuck him up. So he tries not to remember how he felt in Valyria, when he was confronted with a dead man and had to make a split second decision without enough assessment or understanding of the situation. He tries not to think about how his improvised decisions weren’t perfect — so they were called into question. He tries not to think about how stressful that was and how part of why he is obsessing right now is because he’d subconsciously would like to avoid giving the organization’s leadership more reasons to doubt him and his ability to do his job well. 

He tries not to think about how confident he felt, bringing just six highly trained officers to apprehend Bolton — when Selmy had asked him if he was sure. He tries not to remember his logic — that it was just one man, smaller in comparative stature, with no recorded history of violence. He flinchingly tries not to remember himself telling Theon it’s going to be cake, and they’re going to be home for dinner. He tries not to remember how it felt when he woke up and was told that more than half of his people were killed and one was in the intensive care unit still. 

He tries not to think about what he would do if he fails again today. He tries not to think about how it would just be over for him. If he isn’t just killed today, he would leave this place and this job. He would live out the rest of his life alone. 

He makes short eye contact with her, because she spontaneously swivels her head around from her position in the front seat. Her face is blank — schooled in indifference — by him. He is sure that his own face looks the same.

  
  
  
  
  
  


They all wait outside the perimeter as most of them listen to the droning news and wait for the bill to be signed into law — more for their own edification than anything else. 

Selmy is talking into Grey and Drogo’s ears. Grey and Drogo have their heads down and are waiting for Selmy’s go-ahead. They would only move on Selmy’s go-ahead.

It is surprisingly quiet in the car. The easy, joking camaraderie of the previous night has dissipated. Replacing it are the stern game-faces of her colleagues and friends. 

She had been caught unaware and then subsided on just adrenaline and grief in Valyria, which prevented her from doing much reflection as she and he were trying to stay alive in Valyria. So here — perhaps for the very first time, Missandei understands — beyond just an intellectual level — that this could be their last moment together.

She thinks that it will be okay. She is okay with dying with him. She would rather die with him than be left at home, wondering _ again, _ if he was dying somewhere far away — without her. 

“Maybe just a few more minutes,” Grey says softly to all of them, his eyes bright, even still as the sun is starting to burn in the sky. Grey is pushing forward what Selmy is telling them in his ear.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He inhales after Selmy tells him it is done — and also that it’s going to be okay. Grey nods at Drogo, before he kind of verbally gives them all the go wearily. 

They hear his go. Then all start moving. Some car doors get thrown open as the perimeter team hops out. She briefly smears her hand over the stock of her rifle as she watches through the glass, as her bulletproof vest and the rest of her tactical gear continues constricting her chest. This memory of Grey’s mocking face making fun of her for only focusing on cardio at the gym and not weight training briefly flashes in her mind.

Sandor is at the wheel of their car. He starts it up again. He slowly eases it into drive. And then quietly and uneventfully, they leave the perimeter team and head toward the house — this decadent two story behemoth built in the Western style, painted white. Seeing the house in real life mimics exactly how it looked in photos.

  
  
  
  


She honestly thought she’d be more nervous about this — because she is doing it for the first time. However, she finds the excessive preparation and the repetitive run-throughs rides cleanly on top of the adrenaline humming in her body. 

They all get out of the cars and quickly move in formation. They all quickly post outside of the house in their assigned positions after they get Grey’s confirmation that they are moving ahead as planned — after getting Daario’s echo of this in their ears. Daario officially announces to them that this is being recorded and also viewed live by leadership at home. 

Leadership is silent on the line — and she belated realizes that’s because Jojen doesn’t have the connection going both ways — as Grey and half the breach team station themselves at the front entrance. The other half of the team is at the back door, where she and Robb are. There is a second story balcony, a feature they briefly discussed before Grey decided to leave alone. Tactically, it leaves them more vulnerable than necessary.

In her ear, she hears Grey at the front. Executing the arrest warrant, Missandei hears him knock on the door loudly and call out Baelish’s name and request that Baelish surrender himself into their custody. She knows that Grey wasn’t sure if Baelish will opt to open the door and make this easier on them. Grey said to them that it could go fifty-fifty.  

A few seconds tick by with no activity before Grey signals them to breach the doors. 

She is on the back team with Drogo as lead and watches as one of the local officers lifts a hydraulic ram, positions it, and then locks it in place over the door handle. 

The loud blast manages to make her flinch — she didn’t anticipate how loud it was going to be. The successive blasts are easier for her ears to absorb. She hears the cracking and splintering of wood. She tightens her grip on her rifle. And then — amazingly — she sees a member of the breach team reach his hand out to gently swing the door open.

The back door leads into the garage, which is dark.

Drogo goes in first, flicking on his light. 

They are on schedule. Brienne and their local log keeper starts to count the time and narrate events over the line as Daario and their cameras record. 

They all rush the house and start breaking off into the individual rooms. Her rifle is raised and her eyes are scanning the hallway before she rounds the corner and enters a spare bedroom.

She sees an unmade bed, a lamp that is on, and an empty desk. She moves the closet and reaches out to quickly push the door open. 

Empty — not even hangers with clothes on it.

Into her comm, she presses the button and then says, “Bedroom three secured.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


The seconds steadily and slowly tick by in his head — as his heart beats steadily. His cheek is pressed against metal and he’s walking through the house with quick steps. He listens grimly as his people click into the line to announce areas they have secured. He is simultaneously relieved and his adrenaline keeps ramping up as his people continue to log no incidences. He is relieved when he hears her voice on the line, stating that her area is secured.

Another few seconds tick by and he continues to visually assess every area and corner, looking for things that might need to be logged as well as for signs of caution — when he hears another click in his ear. The click is a purposeful tool for them — for them to know the line has reopened. 

It is Sandor. He is saying, “Target apprehended, top floor, first bathroom.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


The arrest team meets him up on the top floor, at the first bathroom.

There, they find Baelish sitting on the closed lid of a toilet in his bathroom, holding his hands up. He is wearing a bathrobe, boxers, and a t-shirt. He has a day’s worth of stubble. Grey has his face partly obscured by his rifle, but Baelish recognizes him anyway. His people keep clicking into his ear, giving him status checks. It is looking like the entire house is empty, save for Baelish.

As Sandor handcuffs Baelish’s hands together behind his back, as Sandor pulls the man to his feet — as Grey lowers his gun — Baelish kind of smiles.

As Sandor perfunctorily pushes Baelish past members of the arrest team and Grey, Baelish smoothly says to him, “Good to see you again. How was Valyria? How is your wife?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


After the arrest and detainment of Petyr Baelish, they spend another concise hour at his New Ghis house, logging evidence. They seize all technology devices in the house, from laptop computers to hard drives to even these ancient-looking, scratched up unmarked CD-ROMs. 

Everything honestly just goes so smoothly that the work is almost like . . . boringly routine, something that Drogo mutters is a fucking blessing because he’s fucking tired of feeling like he is about to have a heart attack with everything having to do with fucking Baelish. 

As she goes over the inventory for the billionth time, doublechecking Daario’s logs — with so much relief and so much bizarre elation — she tells herself that this is  _ fucking everything  _ and that is it  _ finally over. _

She tells herself that  _ this _ is the reason for all of her sacrifices —  _ this  _ is the reason for all of the times she could not spend with her family, all of the years she did not have a personal life, all the moments she had to miss in her friends’ lives, the parties and vacations she couldn’t join in on — the way she gradually became more and more removed from the people in her life — she tells herself that  _ this _ is the reason for all of the isolation and loneliness.

She tells herself that  _ this _ is the reason she put up with Drogo’s fucking shit and his constant verbal abuse.  _ This _ was the fucking driving reason behind her wanting to get out from a desk. She was  _ right. _ The difference is tangible. She can feel it now.  _ This _ is going the fucking thing she remembers later on — that will make the repetitive nights of dressing herself down and soliciting sex from men  _ worth it. _ The humiliation and the oppression and the degradation will be _ worth it _ from here on out.

As she helps the team log and collect evidence, she also secretly and optimistically thinks that they can finally close this shitty chapter of their lives — this shitty chapter that stole years from him. She thinks that they can get a reprieve now. She thinks that they can have fucking dinner together now. She thinks that she can ask him out again for coffee. She thinks that she will probably try and make another case for them to  _ be together. _ She is so optimistic as she thinks that,  _ without this shit _ hanging over his head, he will be more receptive to her love this time around.

She hears a sudden whoop — this sudden graceless holler — and she and Sandor flip their faces over to the commotion, in time to see Daario grab onto Grey, pick him up, hike him over the shoulder, and scream out, “I fucking love you, man! You fucking nailed this, boss!” as Grey generally freaks out and struggles against Daario’s spinning hold.

With both of them in their tactical gear still and the loitering members of their teams watching this in bemusement — well, it makes Missandei smile a little bit.

She watches with a smile as Drogo runs over — speedy because rage makes Drogo fast — to break it up. She watches as Drogo yells at Daario and reminds Daario that Grey is their first and Daario needs to fucking not be treating their first this fucking disrespectfully. 

Drogo is trying to pick Grey out of Daario’s grasp, which Missy knows — Grey really  _ loves. _ She listens and keeps smiles a little bit, as she hears Drogo yells, “Put him the _ fuck down!  _ Right now!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


The news gets out really fast because a press release was probably issued out the exact moment they confirmed Baelish was apprehended. Several versions of a press release was probably already prewritten and poised for send out, long before they arrested Baelish. Missandei has some insight into this — it used to be a little bit her job. It used to be a lot Dany’s job. Missandei imagines that there is probably a disaster-version of a press release on a computer somewhere, one announcing their deaths and trite words about their dedication and service and condolences to their family members — all without naming who they are because of protocol. 

The news gets out fast because Cersei wanted to get in front of it so that she can take the most credit for it. 

During the drive back to city center, Grey is in the back, going over assets with Jojen over the line — as the rest of them silently listen to the satellite broadcast from back home. 

They listen to Cersei’s press conference, about the operation and apprehension of Petyr Baelish, CEO of Littlefinger Investments, a partner of Arryn Capital Holdings and a close family friend of the late Jon Arryn. They listen to her talk about how today’s arrest of this dangerous man was the result of years of hard work of all of her people. They listen to Cersei talk about how, because her team worked day and night to mete out justice, a fatal blow was dealt to human trafficking worldwide. Cersei says that, as a mother and a woman, she will not rest until every woman and child is safe from predatory people like Petyr Baelish who would commoditize them and enslave them. 

Grey’s entire team learns — for the first time ever through Cersei’s press conference, and along with the rest of the world — that Baelish will be charged with a 87-count sealed indictment. 

It’s here that Tal can’t take it anymore. He lets some commentary slip out. He mutters, “Are you fucking kidding me right now?” as he casts his eyes to Drogo, who says nothing in response.

After the press conference is over, political commentary takes its place. On the same satellite channel, they listen to the commentary about how Arryn Capital Holdings was a prime investor in Baelish’s operations, the apparent legitimate side of it. The listen as random subject matter experts speculate on what they as a team have already known for a while — that Arryn’s company had been laundering money for Baelish for years.

Missy thinks that Dany  _ will _ really need that dinner date, when Missy gets home. Dany is going to have  _ a lot _ to say about Cersei taking credit for an operation and a bill that Dany pushed for years for. 

  
  
  
  


 


	59. Grey say no to fun and love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this ep, everyone in our boy's life gives him so much love, and all he does is reject it in a panic because he doesn't think he is deserving. He does promise to take his entire team out to dinner at some point, though! And he does let Missandei get the briefest of snuggles in. He's working on it, guys. He's trying! Also in this ep: Drogo is a dick to Missy. Missy stands up for herself and for someone else. Super annoying, right?

  
  
  
  
  


Grey spends a tight couple of hours with Drogo, Sandor, and Brienne in person — plus Varys on the phone — processing Baelish, filling out paperwork, having long conversation about due process with a dude with a ‘stache, who seems like he resents them making him expedite paper late on a Tuesday night even though they had repeatedly had this conversation — Grey thinks — a fuckton over the last few days. He doesn’t understand why this dude is so surprised and so pissed at them. 

Drogo gets fed up and optimistically assumes there is a language barrier instead of an asshole barrier, so he barks at Missandei and pulls her over to translate between them and their government rep. 

Neither Missy or their rep thinks there is a language barrier. He speaks the Common Tongue near-fluent, albeit with a thick accent. In fact, Drogo’s shitty rudeness compounds their interpersonal issues. In fact, they both think that  _ Drogo _ is the asshole barrier. 

Missy has to stand there awkwardly and softly translate as their government rep shuts her down and becomes more and more agitated that all of them arrogantly keep trying to rush him when he repeatedly told him he can’t make this go any faster. It is clear to Missandei what is happening here. Everyone is just cranky and trying to do their jobs the way they want their jobs done without compromising or empathizing. 

“M!” Drogo snaps at her, irritated that she is still so weak-willed and soft-spoken. “Can you  _ please _ just make it clear to him that if this shit isn’t processed in the next hour, Baelish is not going to be on that fucking plane for take-off and we’d be fucking  _ stuck here _ another six hours!”

“Sir,” their government rep says, directly to Drogo, just  _ seething now. _ “I understand what you are saying. And I’m telling you — you have to wait for the next flight. We did not make it in time.”

“M! Will you please tell him —”

“He understands you, D,” she cuts in — all too gently even though he doesn’t deserve it. “And you clearly are understanding what he is saying.”

  
  
  
  


Grey does not interfere or step in as Drogo completely gets on Missandei’s ass because Drogo thinks Missandei is being insubordinate. In a way, Grey can kind of relate. In Valyria, he sometimes found Missandei’s moral code to be surprisingly annoying and insubordinate at times. Most of the time though — when there’s a lack of urgency in the work — he loves her moral code. He loves that she cares so much.

Sometimes though — when he’d like to get shit done — it would be great if she just didn’t require that everything fit in its fair place before acting.

Grey also doesn’t interfere as Drogo chews Missandei out because he is still constantly questioning all of the special treatment he must be giving her, because he cares about her differently than the way he cares about the rest of the team. He lets her get reamed even though Drogo is being an asshole because it’s a good lesson for her — and also because he doesn’t want to get hassled by Drogo later for always defending her and giving her special treatment. 

Missandei’s face is visibly flushed after she gets the ass-chewing of several lifetimes. When Daario sees it — as she is climbing into their car, he blurts out, “What happened?”

She gives him a meaningful glower, as she silently tilts her head at their fearless leaders — she means to point out Drogo, but Drogo is standing really close to Grey. 

Whether or not he fully understands, Daario still says, “Ah.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


After a supremely stressful and tense few days, they are all craving an opportunity to cut loose and celebrate for a little bit before shit fades back into a lot of sameness in routine.

Daario urges Grey to take the team out for a legit dinner out in public since they are stuck in New Ghis an extra eight hours because they all needed to be rebooked on later flights because of the snafu with Baelish. Daario is less fazed by the extra downtime. He is easy going. He thinks shit happens sometimes, people make mistakes, people are doing their best, an extra half-day in a foreign country isn’t the worst thing in the world — and that, according to all of his bosses — is why he will never reach the leadership heights of Grey and Drogo.  

Daario doesn’t care. He’s not about more stress and more responsibility. He just wants to do a good job and clock out. He thinks that the hard bits are over and they all could use some unwinding. This is why he positively  _ begs _ Grey to allow this. He starts cajoling Grey to take them all out to dinner on the organization’s dime, as a reward for fucking killing it as a team in their work. Tal gets a whiff of this — of a nice free meal and free drinks — and he’s all about this. He bandwagons on.

In response to the pressure, Grey casts this silent look to Drogo — who simply raises his hands up and says, “Your call. You’re number one on this one. I will go with what you think is best.”

Grey is still pretty fucking paranoid and having a hard time fully settling into his pretty clean victory, so honestly what he wants for them all to do is drive directly back to their safe house and then just all sit and stay there until their flight out of New Ghis in the morning. He would like to continue trying to reduce risk. He thinks that the Bolton engagement blew up because he didn’t anticipate enough and then got caught unaware. He thinks that the Arryn engagement blew up because was all fucking distracted and probably sexist and didn’t look at the wife and see her for the fucking power-grabbing murderer that she is. He keeps thinking that if he obsesses and works over every detail enough — all of his people will stay safe.

So he agonizes. They all watch as all of this internal stuff going on his head shows in his eyes.

And then he says, “Sorry, everyone. But I’m not going out tonight. If you want to, of course you can. You can have a celebration stipend — have a few drinks on the organization. You’ve more than earned it.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Even though they think Grey is being too cautious, too paranoid, and too ridiculous — they still respect him very much. They also know him well. His general conservatism tracks — it’s still consistent. 

So no one really grumbles or cajoles him into coming out with them. They actually all cheerfully say that it’s cool. They’ll all just head back to the safe house, eat dinner, have a few beers, and chill together. That will still be fun.

Grey sees what they are doing. They are being so nice to him. And he feels awful about this. He feels awful about his fucked up, stupid brain. 

So back at the house, he drinks more than he wants to for this reason, as Daario puts on what he describes as “the best playlist ever.” There are no speakers, so Daario has to put his phone in a metal bowl to amplify the sound. 

It is also not at all the best playlist ever, which is why Grey hears Drogo and Tal laughingly give Daario a lot of shit for his white trash playlist.  

As everyone around him generally has a nice night, Grey tells himself to just fucking  _ let it go _ and to just accept that there are just some things that he can never be fully in control of — like himself. He makes himself drink a little extra because he feels guilt over the fact that other people constantly have to lift him up.

He is maybe on the verge of being miserably drunk — when he risks this fucking glance at her and sees her gently and politely trying to laugh at something dumb that Daario is saying. He knows she’s been nursing drinks all night.

So he sighs. And he doesn’t think anyone is listening as he quietly mutters that he knows he’s so fucking fun to be around.

Robb, who has sonar ears like a bat, picks up on that. He actually laughs because Grey is being so classically Grey. Robb thinks that only Grey would be so fucking pissed over the perfect execution of something. Only Grey would be unhappy over such excellence because their flight was a little bit delayed due to something completely out of his control. 

“It’s all good, boss,” Robb says to Grey. “Don’t worry so much about this. We’re all safe. We’re all happy. We’re all relaxing. We’re all having a nice time. It’s all good. This is perfect.”

“I’ll take you all out when we get back to King’s Landing, I swear to God,” Grey promises with his eyes hard and targeted — with his voice tight and really forceful. “On my own fucking dime because you all deserve it. So much.”

It makes Robb lightly ricochet his head back as he smiles. He knows Grey is close to drunk. He knows that this passion is coming from the alcohol in Grey’s system.

“Oh  _ shit,” _ Tal says, lifting his beer can at Grey. “Deal! Socializing with G outside of work? That only happens once a year. I am in, _ motherfuckers.” _

“You’re honestly not that bad, G,” Robb continues. “You’ve relaxed a fair bit as you’ve gotten older.” Then, to the rest of them, he spontaneously laughs over a memory — and then he says, “Guys, one time, I was stuck in Yunkai for three months with this asshole —” Robb is gesturing to Sandor. “And G. And I was a newlywed back then, so I was missing my wife a lot — ‘cause it was three months away from her —”

“Oh my fucking God,” Sandor gripes, remembering that particular engagement. “You were constantly  _ talking.  _ I wanted to fucking kill you —”

“Sorry I took an interest in  _ your life!” _ Robb snaps, good-naturedly. Back to the rest of them, he says, “It was  _ three months, _ guys. That’s a long time for us to be roommates. I was passing the time, like, ‘Oh hey, I am missing Talisa. Do you guys also have someone you are missing at home? Tell me about your families.’ And they were constantly like,  _ ‘Shut the fuck up, Robb!’” _

The room appropriately titters in low chuckles at this, because they can all imagine this.

Grey is kind of smiling now — because he also remembers. He is remembering that he didn’t know Robb very well back then. He is remembering that he used to think Robb was really fucking white — and annoying. He is thinking that he still thinks Robb is super white, actually — but no longer annoying. Robb is very sweet, actually.

“All they ever wanted to do when we weren’t working was sit in silence!” Robb exclaims, his voice cracking from holding back laughter. “I’d be like,  _ ‘Lads, do ya wanna watch a movie together tonight?’  _ and they’d be like,  _ ‘Fuck you, Robb.’” _

At this, Sandor leans over and slaps Grey’s arm with the back of his hand. He ignores Robb as he says, “Remember Sallosh?”

“Yeah,” Grey mumbles. “It was the two of us in the forest for a couple weeks.”

“I don’t think we talked once to each other,” Sandor says.

“Yeah, that was amazing,” Grey says. 

“One my favorite engagements.”

“You’re both fucking terrible!” Robb says, throwing his arms in the air in exasperation, to the sound of more laughing. “Don’t act like  _ I’m _ the weird one. You guys are the oddballs. Back me up, M. You know what I’m saying, right?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She’s very shy, especially when she has some spotlight, so she generally shrinks a bit underneath their expectant gazes. She understands that Robb threw it to her because Robb — she has finally figured out — is incredibly emotionally intelligent. Robb threw it to her to try and include her more in the conversation, because she is new, quiet, and odd man out for the most part. She doesn’t have many fun war stories with them because of her lack of experience. She knows that Robb threw it to her because in the past, they have both cracked jokes with each other about how uptight Grey is on work trips.

She catches Grey’s eyes — everyone is looking at her actually, but she specifically zeroes in on his face. She thinks that so much has changed in such a short amount of time. She thinks that things keep changing at such a rapid rate. She is thinking that she honestly has  _ nothing bad  _ to say about him — she can’t really muster up a funny and cute story about how Grey is a stick-in-the-mud to make everyone laugh. She is just thinking that he’s  _ so fucking amazing _ and maybe  _ near-flawless. _ And all she actually wants to do is just be all emotional about this and say what they all already know — he is the very best of all of them, in terms of integrity and work ethic and inner strength.

This pause is long — long enough to get a little thick and maybe a touch awkward.  

And here, Grey sighs, because he knows her incredibly well. He can sense that she’s about to embarrass the shit out of the both of them — again — because she can’t hold in her feelings. 

So here, Grey looks to Robb and says, “You can’t ask her to be objective about this. All she ever does on work engagements is make me uncomfortable with her constant flow of awkward and really inappropriate sexual innuendo. Of course I seem comparatively uptight. But you’d be anxious, too, if you were constantly the victim of her.”

She doesn’t even think about it — her eyes just go wide and purely horrified — over this misinformation — over these  _ lies _ . She drops her jaw open and says, “I do not act like that! I’m  _ very professional!” _

“Like, remember that one time you told me you wanted to wear my skin like it’s a sleeping bag?” Grey says, to the eruption of shocked laughter from the rest of the room. “That wasn’t cool, man.” 

“Okay, so that’s taken out of context,” she protests with a smile, now relaxing her body a little — now leaning into the laughter. “It makes more sense in-context.”

“Hey, remember when G slapped you clear across the face and gave you that major shiner — and then for  _ months afterward —  _ you were following him around like a puppy dog and all like, ‘More please!’” Tal breaks in, all inspired now. “That was some kinky shit, M.”

“Dude!” Daario says. “I can’t even tell you guys  _ all the times, _ I had to listen in on their conversations over the comms. G would be like, ‘Hey, you’re a little off beat tonight, M,’ and she’d be like, ‘Oh my God, have all of my babies!’ I’d be by myself in the van, just going, holy shit, M has no chill whatsoever.” 

“That crush was  _ intense,”  _ Tal says, rubbing his chin. “Must be nice. I wish I had an obsessive fan sometimes.”

“What!” Drogo says, choking on his beer.

“One time, I showed up at Q’s house in Valyria to retrieve M and Arryn’s wife — and M just screamed at me through her uncontrolled sobbing,” Sandor adds, voice deep and booming, even around his chuckling. “She was screaming, ‘How can you eat a  _ sandwich right now,  _ when he is gone!’ And I told her that me being hungry doesn’t really bring G back.”

This sucks all of the air out of the room. 

Grey stiffens and cuts his eyes to the floor.

The cadence of the joke is so off that it creates this vacuum for thick discomfort to whoosh back into the room.

Brienne is shaking her head. “And this is why we try not to have conversations together when we’re working with Clegane.” Brienne is nudging Robb with her elbow. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


The flight home is long and dull — she watches four movies, back-to-back in a row, squished between Drogo’s shoulder and the warm swatch of air that Grey likes to leave in between their bodies because he is being weird around her again. Grey wanted the window seat. Drogo wanted aisle. She is not picky, so she just flopped into the middle before they could comment on it.

They are exhausted but it’s still mid-afternoon when they get home — because of the time difference. They tiredly all say goodbye to each other as he gently pulls her bag out of her hands and hooks the strap of it over his shoulder. She waves bye to their colleagues and then generally follows him quietly as they ride the escalator up a few floors and head to where he parked his car. 

It’s a routine by now — they used to come back on flights together all the time — but also this feels different. 

He throws their bags in the trunk. He’s thinking about how he will need to get up early and go into work to oversee the transfer of assets to Jojen’s team. She’s thinking that maybe she will take a nap on the drive home because she couldn’t sleep at all on the plane.  

She reclines her seat back a little bit as he starts up the car. She watches him as he puts the car in reverse. She smiles at him without holding anything back because they are finally alone. She smiles at him as he behaves awkwardly and pretends she isn’t looking at him the way that she is. He mutters that she should recline all the way back because it’ll be easier for her to sleep that way. 

Then he says to her, “Stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?” she asks lightly, around her yawn — as he continues to avoid looking at her by putting his eyes out the rear window. She feels him easing out of their spot.

“With so much freaking hope in your eyes, goddamn,” he tells her.

This makes her laugh.

“You did really amazing work yesterday,” he says quickly — and it only feels random because he’s been amping himself up for this, for the last half-day. He’s been thinking that she deserves to be told she did great, because all she’s had so far was Drogo yelling at her. 

He blurts it out before she finishes laughing, his voice quiet. 

She hears it anyway. And she dopily beams back at him.

“You should be super proud of yourself,” he tells her, before releasing a pressure-alleviating sigh.

“Are  _ you _ proud of me though?” she says, purposely sounding coy. She thinks that this is probably what everyone means, when they say she is flagrant with him sometimes. 

“How I feel isn’t relevant to what you have accomplished,” he says, trying hard to sound casual and flippant. “But of course I’m proud of you.”

It’s really all she needs right now.

So sleepily, she murmurs, “Oh my  _ God,” _ as she bravely reaches out to drag her hand down his arm. She boldly tells him, “Drive us around _ forever, _ okay? I hope there’s a lot of traffic getting home.”  

  
  
  
  
  
  


She has to say goodbye to him again — but at least this time, she is fairly sure she will see him again in a matter of hours. 

He keeps sighing at her and quietly telling her to stop. She’s pretty sure he’s telling her to stop being so fucking in love with him — and well, that is a funny thing to say to a person.

She searches his face as he slows the car to a stop in front of her house. 

She pulls her phone out of the pocket of her jeans. He is patient and tolerant — but not posing for her — as she carefully takes a clear photo of his face. She explains her actions to him pretty simply. She says, “I don’t have any real pictures of you. Just pictures of us from our fake relationship.”

He doesn’t respond to this. He just stares at her pensively. 

“Grey,” she says softly, almost whispering his name.

“What?” he says, with his brows furrowed.

“Don’t you want a picture of me, too?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They don’t go anywhere alone, no matter how minor — and habits are ingrained — so he gets out of the car and he walks her to her front door — in broad daylight. He hovers close to her, just covering her body with his from most angles. 

She misreads his intentions — or maybe she reads him right. Nonetheless, she pulls him into her foyer so that nobody can hurt them, before she gives him a hug goodbye. She wraps her arms around him — she doesn’t care if he freaks out and pushes her away. She’s ready for it. She just sways on her feet as she holds onto him — she feels drugged off his warmth and just happy.

She laughs quietly into his neck, lingering there a little bit and thinking about giving him a kiss there, as she softly thanks him for walking her to her door. She runs her hands down his arms before she grasps his hands. She feels him push his fingertips into the divots of her knuckles.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She feels like she is dying from this shit all the time. Her eyes are stinging from this — as she makes herself keep it light, as she laughingly asks him who is going to walk him back to his car now? 

Grey doesn’t get a chance to answer her. Because her dad interrupts them.

“Baby, you’re home?” he says, coming out of the kitchen. He’s still holding onto an oven mitt. Her dad stops when he spots Grey.

Grey drops her hands like they are hot potatoes. The moment they were having is broken.

“Hey!” her dad says — sounding pleasantly surprised but not like,  _ too psychotically cheerful,  _ like how his daughter sometimes sound in regard to this person. Her dad is actually practiced and experienced and scarily insightful, so he is convincingly casual and relaxed as he looks super directly at Grey and says, “Do you want to stay for dinner? I’ve made so much food.”

And Grey falters — his face starts to burn in shame. He opens his mouth and closes it a few times in nervousness. His heart starts to beat hard. He is mostly thinking that he has a modest amount of munitions in the trunk of his car and he actually really needs to drive straight to campus and log it all in asap. He is also thinking that he’s such a fucking dork — he’s so fucking remedial because he is incapable of eating food with other people like a normal person. 

She saves him from answering. She says, “He can’t, Dad. He doesn’t have the time right now.”

“Oh,” her dad says pleasantly. “Maybe another time, then.”

Grey’s heart is still trying to beat itself out of his chest, as he nods, as he says, “Yes, that would be nice.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She watches as Grey positively runs the fuck out of her house — and that is very much a familiar sight to her. She presses down a few vinyl slats of her blinds and watches him out the window — to make sure that he gets into his car okay. 

“Sorry I interrupted,” her dad says from behind her — watching her watch Grey.

“It’s all good,” she mutters, finally pulling back after Grey drives off.

“He looks good,” her dad offers. “It’s been what? Less than four months since he’s gotten back?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“He looks really good, actually,” her dad says optimistically.

At this, she lets out a brief chuckle. She gives her dad a side hug — because he’s the best. She says, “Thanks, Daddy.”

“I’m also really glad to see you — in one piece — and happy again.”

“Oh my God, the last few days were really intense,” she says, letting him lead her into the kitchen. “It’s so good to be home. What are you cooking?”

  
  
  
  
  
  



	60. Missy almost gets saved by a hero

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this ep, our boy continues to struggle and heal himself, as his job continues to relentlessly kick him in the ass. I know, same ol' same ol'. Human trafficking is getting quite the heyday and people happen to care about it right now! Whoo! The future love of Grey's life meets a knight in shining armor — that's what she gets for standing around looking like a damsel in distress. Then, our boos travel to the Vale with Bronn, where Grey puts back on his hot-psycho personality and Missandei continues being annoyingly confident in that way men are threatened by, interspersed between moments of pure thirst.

  
  
  
  


He is eating raisin bran with milk because this is also now in his repertoire. He eats his breakfast-dinner at the tail end of a late night shift with the ground team. His parents are awake and slow in getting ready for work — he is watching them drink coffee through the home hub in his kitchen.

His mom now has a better understanding of his work schedule. As he accurately predicted, she completely hates it and constantly tells him it’s unhealthy to forgo sleep all the time. He likes to dully repeat himself and tell her he catches up on his days off — he hibernates on Saturdays. She likes to tell him that’s not how sleep works. She likes to tell him about research or news she has read about people who died because they were sleep-deprived. He likes to point out the people died because they were operating machinery or something, and it was the car that killed them.

To which she likes to snap, “You carry  _ a gun _ for work!”

“Ma,” he says tiredly, stirring his soggy cereal around in the bowl. When the cereal becomes soft, he can no longer eat it. “I’m not going to let myself get accidentally shot — again. Like, lesson learned.”

“You think it’s funny to joke about how you almost died?”

“Sometimes.”

Of course he has noticed — he’d have to be an idiot not to notice — that his dad has been distant, that his dad is not rushing to chat with Grey the way that his mom has been. Of course he’s been noticing that even though he is telling the truth now, the distance between them has been increasing and increasing. 

He figured this though — that the truth about him would be hard for his folks to take. He just thought it’d be harder for his mom, not his dad.

  
  
  
  
  
  


On Thursday, he sees a real suspect meeting get put on his calendar for the afternoon. And when he scans his newsfeed, he understands why. 

On his computer monitor, at his desk with his earphones plugged in, Grey watches a press conference with Baelish’s lawyer — an old white-haired fuck — with a bunch of microphones shoved at his face. The old fuck is telling the reporters that he believes that law enforcement used excessive force — extraordinary force, actually — in the apprehension of his client. Baelish’s lawyer is asking why the raid required dozens of personnel and military weapons just to arrest a 45-year-old man who has done nothing but complied with law enforcement.  

Grey then quickly scans other news about Baelish, about the 87-count sealed indictment and speculation that Baelish’s “marketplace website” selling sex was really a front for human trafficking, particularly of children. Grey reads news commentary from proponents of the new bill and the shutdown of the site. He also reads criticism from sex worker advocates, who say that the new bill is only driving trafficking underground and overseas and drying up an avenue for sex workers to safely screen clients. 

Grey goes over the cost of the raid and the number of personnel on it — for what is probably the thousandth time. 

By the time his 1 p.m. meeting is set to begin, he is pretty prepared. He gets to the conference room before Tywin does. He sees Selmy, Drogo, Cersei, Tyrion, Jon, Olenna, and Renly. He grabs the empty seat in between Selmy and Drogo and then opens up the screen of his laptop where his notes are.

When Tywin arrives — one minute late without an apology — he is holding a tablet underneath his arm, and he is  _ really tense. _ The first person he zeroes in on is actually his daughter. To Cersei, he says, “Why are you here? Why are you not out there cleaning up this fucking public shit stain?”

She actually falters. With her eyes wide, she says, “I thought I was supposed to be here — I got the calendar notification —”

“That is actually your problem, isn’t it? You just _ don’t think.” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


“Fuck that bullshit, man,” Drogo growls under his breath, as he rushes out of the conference room with Grey and Selmy following quickly behind him.  “They just won’t be happy until someone else  _ dies _ so they can save a buck, will they? They won’t be happy unless your heart stops beating, right? And when that happens, they will surely get on  _ my ass _ about how my ineptitude resulted in you fucking  _ dying.” _

“Drogo,” Selmy says warningly, walking briskly to keep up with Drogo’s large strides. “People can overhear you.”

“We just can’t fucking win, man,” Drogo presses. “Fucking come in under budget, and they’re wondering why we fucked up in estimating cost accurately. Fucking lose our shirts because we are understaffed, and they get on our asses for being ‘underprepared.’ Fucking execute a raid  _ perfectly, _ and they’re fucking lecturing us on wasting organizational resources and giving some fucktard ammunition to get his weasel client off based on some bullshit! Fucking unbelievable!”

“I need to go to the men’s room,” Grey says suddenly — and rather calmly. “My stomach hurts. I think I’ve been consuming too much dairy.”

“Son, are you okay?” Selmy asks — immediately concerned.

Grey is touching his stomach and wincing. He might actually be feeling some phantom gunshot pains — is that a thing? He is feeling knots and pain in his abdomen. 

“Yeah, I might just be a little lactose intolerant,” he says. “Plus that meeting just gave me a stomach ache.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


With the new fervor and passion that the general public currently feels about human trafficking due to the news lately — they are turnt on being intolerant of it — it becomes a bigger part of Missy’s personal life. For instance, Doreah talks about how any child can fall prey to a predator  _ even her children —  _ and Missandei has to fight not to be flippant and say something like: Statistically  _ probably  _ not your white, upper middle class kids because the overwhelming majority of victims are Black or Brown — but yeah, it’s _ scary _ when stuff hits close to home. 

Human trafficking becomes a hot topic at the family dinner table, with her brothers telling their dad and Bettie all about this training they recently underwent at work. She generally keeps her mouth shut because her brothers still have not warmed up to Bettie — nor Bettie them — and Missy would rather not rock the boat.

All of this passion about her life’s work even hits her in an unexpected way while she’s on the job. Like, she becomes an accidental victim that a do-gooder tries to misguidedly save.

She’s actually taking a short break from work cuz there was a comms malfunction because, holy shit, they really just cannot get approval for the equipment upgrade so she’ll just die on the job one day because of equipment malfunction, no big deal. 

She is wearing a tight dress, waiting to get plugged back in with her team in her ear and holding a hot cup of coffee in her hands that she bought from a late night burger place. She is lightly blowing off the steam from the top of the paper cup by herself. She watches in a daze — in vague disbelief — as a really motivated man makes a beeline right for her. 

She squares her shoulders and stares at him as he advances. 

She warily says, “Don’t come any closer. I don’t want trouble.”

He notices her posture and slows down. He holds up his hands. He says, “I saw you standing here by yourself — and I just wanted to talk to you and make sure you’re okay. How are you doing tonight? My name is Qotho, and I’m from the Women’s Safety Center.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


When the line connects again, they all hear Missandei unexpectedly talking to someone — causing Daario to grumble and rhetorically ask them what was even the point of him telling people to wait for his go-ahead before resuming if they were just gonna do whatever they felt like anyway? Daario is a little bit stressed because Grey has been breathing down his neck over shit he cannot help. They need the equipment upgrade pretty fucking badly — and that’s on Drogo.

After a few seconds of listening in on the conversation — listening to Missandei try to get rid of the guy — Grey unhelpfully cuts into her ear with, “M, move it along, already. We’re behind schedule. Need you back at your post asap.”

They put up with thirty more seconds of pure persistence — of the do-gooder trying to get her to see her self-worth and see that she has other options in life besides prostitution. The team in the van put up with thirty more seconds of Missandei doing a shit job of getting the guy off her back because she’s reluctant to be mean and rude to him — before Grey softly swears under his breath and then reaches out to grab the cap from off of Gendry’s head.

Grey has to be the one that goes out because of the neighborhood they are in — because he’s the only one who is not white. 

Grey is ticked over struggling with the fucking comms system, a little ticked at Missandei for these continuing little hiccups and for being too nice, ticked at the intruder for being misguidedly heroic, ticked at the situation — just super frustrated in general. 

As he walks up to them — as they spot him — the do-gooder makes a move to stand in front of Missandei, body-blocking her from Grey. Grey sees her bewildered bright eyes before they are covered by the guy’s body. 

“Excuse me, can I help you?”

Grey stops himself from rolling his eyes. He doesn’t flash his ID because he doesn’t want to fucking get found out as law enforcement and blow this fucking shit to death. He just uses his voice to say, “Sir, we’re law enforcement. We’re working right now, and you are in the way and endangering her. You need to leave.  _ Right now.” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


By the end of the shift, Grey is completely exhausted and a little nauseous from all the shitty coffee he has consumed to stay awake — and she has been waiting hours to grill him and ask him questions because she is like an annoying-ass sponge sometimes. She corners him before they split off to their different locker rooms. 

She tells him that she didn’t realize that she could just tell people the truth to get them to go away. That’s not part of the documented procedure for these situations.

Grey has had  _ a day.  _ He’s currently tired of relentlessly mentoring people all the time — not just her, but also Pod, Gendry, Tal, Balaq, Alayaya — just everyone. 

He tiredly says, “Sometimes we improvise to be efficient.”

“But when do you know to improvise and when do you stick to the script?” she asks. “Because sometimes I feel like it’s a good time to improvise, but when I try, you’re like, ‘Stick to the script, Missandei!’ Is there like, a general formula or a rule of thumb? Like — is it when you try it by the book three times and it doesn’t work,  _ then _ you improvise?”

“There’s no formula,” he says. “You just adapt with new information.”

“But how do you know?” she presses. “Are there qualities that you are looking for? For instance, is it if you sense someone is persistent like that man was today? Did you sense that he wouldn’t leave through intimidation? How did you know?”

Honestly, Grey was just fucking tired — and probably slipped up a little bit because he is fucking tired.

“And what if he didn’t believe you — what then?” she presses on. “What would you do if he was like, ‘Show me your ID!’? What would you have done?”

He stops himself from sighing. He stops himself from screaming out that he actually doesn’t  _ know everything.  _ He stops himself from just melting down and telling her that he could really fucking use a break from her incessant questions — that sometimes he just doesn’t fucking  _ know, _ and he’s just trying to do his fucking best without getting anyone hurt. He stops himself from yelling that he is just  _ making this shit up _ as he goes along sometimes.

“I do quick mental assessments,” he says, kind of lying. He’s lying because this is what he would prefer that she do. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


She’s been deferring a lot of personal plans. The people in her life — mostly her brothers and Doreah — have been commenting that she’s been traveling a lot for work. She has been agreeing with them. She’s also tired of it. She’s tired of being constantly disoriented because the time zone changes mess with her sleep patterns.

It’s strangely worse for her when the time difference is only a few hours. Their flight to the Vale is meant to be a quick one — and she’s yawning before they even leave the tarmac. 

Bronn is lead on this short engagement, having been the point of contact on this for months now. 

For this reason — because he has no real responsibility on his hands — Grey is positively relaxed and falling neatly into persona. She watches him as he smoothly pulls on a pair of sunglasses and flips open the flap of his suit jacket in order to pocket his phone in the inner breast pocket. 

She thinks that he looks fucking hot as shit. 

She’s been thinking this since they all met up in the morning. She looks comparatively low-rent in her wrinkled drab gray pantsuit that looks like it was definitely purchased on a government employee salary. She remembers Bronn letting out a low whistle when they both watched Grey stroll up to them at the airport in his tailored threads. She remembers Bronn telling Grey he looks “pretty gay” as she winced over that internally and fought not to correct Bronn out loud. 

She doesn’t think Grey looks gay in that perjorative, homophobic way at all. She just thinks he looks really, really great. Just really good. She thinks that he looks like he smells really good. She thinks that he looks like he has great forearms — which he  _ does. _ She knows. She’s seen them. She loves it when he rolls up his sleeves. Or wears t-shirts. She thinks that he has been looking better — like he’s gained back a little weight. 

This frivolousness is largely what she’s mentally wrapped up in, as they wait for their rental car. 

She is listening in, as Grey is like, making  _ small talk _ with Bronn as they watch for the attendant to drive their car up. Grey is saying to Bronn, “Hey, man, have you done Silvercar?”

Bronn has worked with Grey for years and is taking the weird friendliness in stride. Bronn is saying, “No, what is that?”

“It’s a car rental service where you they pick you up curbside at the airport instead of making you shuttle to a place like this. The gimmick is that all their cars are silver Audis.”

“Whoa,” Bronn says. “Why don’t we do one of those?”

“I mean, man, you  _ could.  _ Book it next time.” 

She muses to herself as she listens to this conversation. She is thinking that the last time he faded into this personality, she was caught unaware because, uh, she is dumb and he also completely forgot to tell her he’s a fucking chameleon and to not be alarmed if he suddenly flips off his severe and serious homebase and puts on his sexy unhinged psychopath persona. 

As their black car rolls up, Grey sighs and says, “Oh shit, a BMW 3 Series?”

“Yeah,” Bronn says, misunderstanding the utterance. “We got a free upgrade because they were low on stock.”

“I actually hate this car, man,” Grey says, clarifying, patting Bronn on the shoulder. “You’ll see.”

“What? I heard such good things.”

“You’re tall,” Grey says, looking up at Bronn’s stature. “Your head is gonna kiss the ceiling. You’ll see. It’s weirdly designed. And the lane-keeping tech is like, jarring and annoying. The center console is also annoying. You’ll see, man. There are just a lot of annoying things about that car.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


This personality is a gentleman. Normal Grey leaves her to struggle and heave herself into cars by herself. Hot-psycho Grey is chivalrous, so he opens and then holds the car door for her after she insists that she will sit in the back. She looks at the lens of his glasses as she slides by — with this smile threatening to tug at the corner of her mouth. She looks at his obscured expression before she ducks into the backseat. She sees his mouth slowly start to smile back at her as she collapses onto leather. 

There’s been a low-key sense of excitement and of knowing — all day so far. They are all in good spirits.

“Watch your feet,” he says to her, before he slams the door shut.

  
  
  
  
  
  


After the gate to the gated community opens, after Bronn spends the entire drive bitching about their rental car and proclaiming that Grey was right, after they get patted down by security upon arriving at the house, after they wait five minutes for her to float down the stairs and show her face — well, Grey is sitting at the end of a marble table with his hands folded neatly together in front of him. His glasses are still on. It’s incredibly foreboding and pretty extra. 

The first thing he says to Lysa when he sees her is, “Hey, fuck you, Lysa, do you remember me? I know, you thought I was dead.  But surprise! I am  _ not. _ I am here right now. And we’re about to have another chat together.”

Lysa looks  _ panicked  _ right away — which was Bronn’s exact intention for this when he asked Selmy if he could borrow Grey and Missandei for a day. 

Lysa casts her eyes to Bronn, who she is used to dealing with. She is looking to Bronn like Bronn is going to protect and save her from Grey. 

She says, “What is  _ he  _ doing here!”

“Okay,  _ rude,” _ Grey says. 

“He wanted to see you again,” Bronn explains to her — really unhelpfully. “So here we are.”

“That man  _ assaulted  _ me and held me against my will,” Lysa says, her voice pointed and clipped. “He’s a _ criminal.” _

“Wow, glass houses,” Grey drawls. “How is your son, by the way? How is little Robin?”

“Oh my God! You stay away from my son or you will  _ regret it!  _ Get the hell out of  _ my house.” _

“Ah, your boyfriend must’ve told you to stay strong because  _ your love  _ is so strong,” Grey says calmly. “I hear you, Lysa. I hear you. You want to go to prison for him because you love him _ so much.  _ He is definitely the type to  _ wait _ for you to serve your thirty years. He seems loyal.” _ ” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


They are here purely to rattle Lysa. Bronn reported that negotiating with her has been fruitless — that, terrible as it may be, she may love Baelish more than she loves her son. Grey doesn’t really agree with this assessment — but he’s been wrong plenty of times before.

For months, Bronn has expressed frustration over negotiating with someone that is pretty deluded, pretty narcissistic, and completely lacking in self-awareness. 

Missandei watches as Grey continues to grate on Lysa’s nerves — watches as Lysa postures and repeatedly snaps at him and is tireless in insulting him. Missandei knows that he’s going to turn it over to her in a little bit — because they talked about it in prep for this. 

Missandei benignly thinks that this was totally the plan back in Valyria, but she just didn’t really get that memo, on account of the emergency situation and also because she was just too green and idiotic to pick up on the plan.

“Hey, guys — maybe let’s all take a break and regroup in a second,” Missandei says, laying a hand on Grey’s shoulder. She glances at Lysa. Their eyes connect for a moment.

“I’m not an idiot,” Lysa says petulantly, crossing her arms. “I know a bad cop, good cop routine when I see it.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Despite accurately guessing what is going on, Lysa is still fairly amenable as she talks to Missandei. That is the beauty of deluded people who think they are the smartest people in the room.

Missandei lays out the facts and doesn’t try to sell Lysa on it. She is saying the things that Bronn and Grey have repeatedly already said, but Lysa is antagonistic with them and hasn’t listened to them. Missandei also thinks that Lysa is still willfully deaf and obstinate with her, but at some point, this will have to end, and this will eventually sink in. 

There are no flourishes in delivery because Lysa is right — Missandei cannot manipulate her, not after Missandei showed all of her cards and all of her weaknesses and all of her emotions in Valyria. 

Missandei distinctly goes anti-Grey in her approach. She is plain-faced, plain-spoken, and honestly herself as she says to Lysa, “You are going to prison — no matter what. Your lawyers are lying to you. There is no deal where you hold out and you get immunity — because you killed your husband. We  _ know that. _ The only thing up for negotiation is how long you are in prison for. Do you want to lose that time with your son? Is Petyr worth it? What has he done for you lately? What did he do when he tried to retrieve you and it didn’t work? Yeah — he didn’t try again. He just let you go. You wanna give up your life and your relationship with your son to a man who just let you go?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Bronn wants to get home right away because he’s sick of his trips to the Vale. So the three of them eat dinner at the airport, in the food court among a bunch of other loitering travelers. 

Instead of fixating and discussing the imperfections of their legal system in her head alone, instead of talking about how every fucking person out there has an overly simplistic take on their very complicated jobs, instead of bitching about how they are trying to negotiate with a woman who killed her husband and coordinate leaner sentencing so that she will sell out a man who honestly does not give two shits about her — instead of talking about how that asshole Lysa Arryn is in many respects, a victim of predatory men herself — well, Missandei is really tired. She’s tired physically and emotionally over this shit. 

So she opens her mouth.

So she actually behaves completely in-character and ruins Bronn’s chill evening by bringing up how her sex worker friend is serving a life sentence that will probably amount to 25 years because her friend is not a rich white lady with assets to trade for her freedom. 

“Like, Yiantha will not get to be with her kid until her kid is a full-grown adult,” Missy says dully, spearing a piece of lettuce with her fork. “She will miss an entire life because of a mistake.”

“The mistake of killing a  _ human being,” _ Bronn mutters, as he takes a big bite out of his steaming hot, melty pizza slice. 

“It’s not that black and white.”

“I’m the first person to point out gray areas, babe,” Bronn says to her. “But this is murder. You kill, you do time.” 

_“We_ kill people, as an organization,” she points out. _“We_ _don’t_ do time.”

“Ah, well, that’s different,” Bronn responds. His responses have been getting shorter and shorter — vaguer. Because he’s pretty sick of how uppity Missandei can get.

“Lysa Arryn killed  _ someone,” _ Missandei says with her expression pinched. “And she’s going to get a break because some asshole is just a  _ terrible _ human being. You are saying that makes sense to you?”

“I don’t fucking write the laws, Missandei,” Bronn gripes. “I just work a fucking job that pays me shit ‘cause the decisions I made in life led me here. I just fucking want to eat my fucking  _ dinner _ without you getting on my  _ fucking nuts _ about how shitty white men are. Jesus Christ.”

“It’s not fair!” Missy snaps back. “You just don’t care that it’s not fair?”

“He doesn’t,” Grey cuts in frankly. He’s got a half-eaten slice of cheese pizza in his hand. “Is that what you want him to say? You want him to tell you he knows he’s amoral? Okay. He sucks. We all agree Bronn is a shitty human —”

“Hey —”

“Missandei, seriously — get off his balls,” Grey continues, waving his pizza around. “He’s been working on this  _ for months. _ Today is your _ first day.  _ You’re actually in the wrong here. You’re being a dick to him.” 

She is staring at him, completely speechless.

Grey shrugs at that. And then to Bronn, he changes the subject because he senses that all Bronn wants to do right now is a fuckton of nothing as they wait for their flight. Grey says, “Yo, is it me, or is this like,  _ extra delicious?  _ I actually love shitty pizza more than artisanal three-ingredient pizza.”

“I love arcade pizza, man,” Bronn says tepidly, kind of unexpectedly demure because he honestly did not expect for Grey to be his knight in shining armor — like, at all. “Thick crust, dripping with red fat, little bits of orange cheddar cheese in there.”

“Yeah, I didn’t get into pizza like that until college,” Grey adds. “Because the Isles have really shit pizza — weird cheese, weirdly sweet — just gross. But when I moved over here and had real pizza for the first time in my life — it was like, oh my God. I used to buy whole pies and freeze them.”

“What?” Bronn says quizzically. “Why did you save pizza?”

“Because I had no friends to share my pizza with,” Grey says, stone-faced about it. “Not at first anyway. I was alone here. It took a couple years for me to make friends.”

“What? No, you lying. You had to have had friends! Everyone has friends!”

Grey is shaking his head. “For real, man.”

Bronn is shaking his head, too — in regret. “That’s so sad, man. I can’t believe I’m sad for you.”

“I like how  _ this _ makes you sad for me,” Grey says, tapping the table between them, face blank. “Not the mutilation. Not the months of imprisonment. It’s this pizza thing.”

  
  


 

 


	61. What's going on with Grey's tummy?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something weird has been going on with Grey's tummy and everyone in his life is telling him to get that shit taken care of. Grey is like, dragging his feet on it, probably because he doesn't want to get told that he is destined to die young without a chance to finish his emotional healing. The love of Grey's life is slipping and doing what she's trying not to do — be an intrusive person in his life. She also gets asked out on a date! Also in this ep: Dany being hilarious and Drogo getting to maybe second or third base with Grey?

  
  
  
  
  


 

He drops Missandei off at her house and ensures that she gets into her house safe and in one piece. She tries to hug him again, but he fell for that trap once already. He just says goodbye to her at a distance and reminds her that their eight a.m. meeting was cancelled because he doesn’t think she checked her email recently. He looks after her as he walks away — backwards — he watches as she waves goodbye to him from inside her entryway. He observes that it’s been a tiring day for her, too. He tells himself that it’s happening — it’s starting to happen. The glass of his facade is cracking for her — she is starting to finally see him for who he actually is. He knows he is not who she is hoping he’d be. He knows that he is not as principled as she is hoping he’d be. He knows that he doesn’t stand for anything. He knows that standing for things is important to her.

He makes short work of getting himself home and ready for bed.

He is tired, but he forces himself to neatly lay out and hang up his clothes so they don’t get wrinkled. He washes his greasy face and brushes his teeth — and generally looks at himself and his bare body in the mirror — and he tells himself he’s probably okay, that he’s going to continue being probably okay. He reminds himself for the millionth time that his life is pretty cush, as he walks around his apartment, checking the window locks, the deadbolt on the front door, and the gun on his nightstand.

As he pulls back his covers, he reminds himself he needs to check in with his parents — he’s been so busy with work and traveling so much that he hasn’t had much opportunities to video chat with them. He reminds himself to buy and send his brother a nameday present. He reminds himself he needs to figure out how to take a whole bunch of people to dinner because he told them he owes them one and he’s a person of his word. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei goes over to Dany’s apartment on the weekend to help Dany pack up her things. Dany won’t hire movers because she is ashamed of the shambles of her life and how much all her shit smells like dog pee. Dany guilted Missy into it, telling Missy that Dany only has one friend in the entire world, and it’s Missandei. 

Missy doesn’t think that Dany needs to manipulate her so hard into helping. Missandei thinks that all Daenerys literally needs to do is ask — like a normal person would.

Missy expects for Dany to spend a shit ton of time bitching about how she will throw acid into Cersei Lannister’s face — for stealing credit for years of Dany’s hard work. Missy also expects that she herself will complain about Drogo — which is one of Dany’s favorite topics, how much of a fucking turd Drogo is. They will probably spend a lot of time bonding over that shared belief.

Missandei also anticipates she’d try to be more open and vulnerable around Dany to continue repairing their relationship. She suspects she will tell Dany all about how she keeps getting reminded that she’s hopelessly sexually attracted to the offbeat and darker side of Grey’s personality — like, by a lot. Like, she is exhilarated by how he callously disregards her feelings sometimes — because that’s his way of getting her out of her own head. Like, she is thrilled by the way he shuts her down and straight up tells her when she’s being an asshole — because he talks to her like how he’d talk to any of his male team members. Like, she thinks it’s sexy, how he doesn’t listen to her that closely and how he tells her when he thinks her problems are dumb and frivolous. 

Like, she sometimes yearns for and misses that one time that he hit her in the face — because he did it in the course of trying to help her, and she is attracted to his severity. Like, she constantly yearns for how he used to tie her down before he spent an agonizing amount of time making her come to orgasm with his mouth. That was a fucking  _ great  _ thing about being with him — that she is attracted to. She can’t erase the knowledge of him and the memories from her mind. 

Like, she finds all the times he threatens violence on people to be a little scary in authenticity, but also exhilarating and thrilling and heart-pumping — and she wants to ask her best friend what that says  _ about her — what does that say about her as a woman?  _

She wants to ask Dany if Dany thinks Missandei might be wrapped up in a destructive and toxic relationship? Missy doesn’t think so — but Dany’s opinion is sometimes important to her. 

Missandei doesn’t get to do _ any _ of what she wants to do with Dany — because when she arrives with two bottles of wine, she sees that Grey is  _ already there.  _

  
  
  
  
  
  


He’s already tense-looking and sweaty, probably from lifting heavy things, probably from holding in anger or annoyance, at the ridiculous shit Dany requests from people sometimes. 

Missy’s heart starts to pound.

The dogs are also losing their minds and barking. Dany has gotten complaints from her neighbors. 

Dany is moving homes because she has realized that her apartment cannot contain her dogs. Plus, it’s totally against building policy for them to even exist there. Plus, taking them out to pee is inconveniently hard. 

Dany spots the two wine bottles that Missandei has bagged up and is like, “Oh. Is that enough for the three of us?”

And instead of hysterically screaming at Dany, telling Dany that all the demanding texting was  _ a lot  _ and Missandei is still freaking confused over why Dany thought  _ one bottle per person _ in the course of packing was  _ reasonable —  _ instead of doing that, Missy just blurts, “What are you doing here?”

“Packing,” Grey answers.

“I have more than  _ one friend,  _ Missandei,” Dany says impatiently — with a lecturing tone — with her arms crossed over her chest. “Honestly, you act like I’m this friendless loser sometimes. I should be offended. Bring over the bottles. We haven’t packed glasses yet because we’ve been waiting for you. We expected you on the hour. Was there traffic or something?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Within the hour, Dany completely gets drunk and then stops contributing to the task that she has requested from them as a favor. Dany pretty much goes full-on rich white lady about it all and gets maudlin and emotional on her dirty couch, telling them about how her life sucks because it doesn’t feel like she is  _ earning _ her six-figure salary anymore.

She is also saying, “Do they even know how fucking much I could be making if I was working in the private sector? I gave up so much money to do good.”

“You have family money, though,” Missandei offers, as she wraps another plate in newspaper. “So I’m not sure I’d qualify what you are doing as ‘giving up money.’”

“Missandei, that’s irrelevant,” Dany corrects. “Besides, the Lannisters have way more money than my family does.”

“Dany,” Missandei says, biding time as she thinks, glancing real quickly and nervously at Grey, because now Grey gets to watch Missandei just condone this shit in her life after she spent a lot of time schooling other people on this kind of shit. She is nervously waiting for Grey to realize she is a  _ hypocrite _ . 

To stave that off, she tepidly says, “Dany, this conversation is crazy. Your problems are  _ crazy.” _

“They feel real to me, though,” Dany says, voice disembodied. They can’t see her well since she is lying down now. “Isn’t that what you always say to me when I talk about my fucking stupid problems? You always tell me, ‘Dany, your problems are real because they feel real to you.’” 

Missandei doesn’t even get to nervously sweat and yell out something awkward to deflect — because then they hear Dany grunt loudly before yelling, “No! Stop! Leave Mommy alone! No! Stop! Fuck! Dammit, you smell!”

And then before either one of them can offer a comment, Dany continues on with, “By the way, Miss, the housekeeper cleans the house only. I asked her — and it’s actually unreasonable and rude to ask her to also clean the dogs.”

Missy’s face flushes — because  _ actually, _ the fucking conversation they had about this consisted of Dany wondering out loud if she can pay her housekeeper to clean the dogs, with Missandei tepidly saying probably not. 

Dany is doing  _ such _ shitty PR for her with Grey. And maybe  _ this  _ is why Dany fucking lost her job — because maybe she is actually bad at it.

“Oh my God! Do you guys think there’s some sort of medical procedure or surgery to make their mouths stop  _ smelling?” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


They actually continue working for another half-hour after Dany completely passes out on her couch.

It feels awkward between the two of them without Dany’s drunken blathering. 

Missandei is really wrapped up on how she probably looks like an asshole to Grey like,  _ all the time _ now _.  _ Like, he will probably never love her back because she is a fucking  _ asshole,  _ and Grey has little patience for assholes _.  _ Like, he will probably never love her back because he sees how insanely high maintenance her best friend is, and now Grey probably thinks that Missy’s super high maintenance, too. He already felt really oppressed in their relationship because — oh God — he probably  _ already believes _ that she is incurably high maintenance and this is why he will never love her back! He hates it when people are high maintenance!

Grey is actually more wrapped up in how he didn’t think his Saturday night was going to be like this. He thought Dany would help more. He thought he’d at least get offered dinner that he’d decline, but she just passed out after talking about how much money she has. He wasn’t offered any dinner at all — just wine that he had to open and uncork and  _ pour for her _ . 

He just envisioned his Saturday night differently — and he didn’t think letting Daenerys back into his life again entailed  _ this. _ Like, he didn’t think it entailed him wrapping up her shit in newspaper and labeling it for her as she snores on the couch. 

“She’s not normally like this,” Missandei offers quietly. “She’s had a rough few months. And the dogs . . .” She is trailing off because she doesn’t know what to say about the dogs. They are now sleeping and relaxing around Dany’s prostrate body.

“I mean, we’ve all had a rough few months,” Grey says — and he’s joking. “But yeah, Dany got dogs.” His delivery is so deadpan and so direct that it doesn’t sound like a joke at all.  

Missandei flushes as she closes the top flaps of a cardboard box full of dishware. 

She stares at his nearly full glass of red. And because she is searching for something to say, she lightly says, “You’ve been nursing that all night. Not feeling the bouquet? The tannins too . . . tannin-y?”

He kind of laughs quietly at that — at her supremely lame joke. The joke actually reminds him of the work trips they used to take to wineries, when they were pretending to be married, before they knew Jon Arryn was going to die and his wife was going to be the biggest pain in their asses. 

He shrugs. He says, “It’s fine. Do you want the rest of it? I just . . . have no appetite for anything.” After a pause, he also carefully adds, “My stomach has been giving me trouble.”

She scrunches up her nose. “What do you mean? Like diarrhea?”

That makes another surprised laugh sneak out of him, as he shakes his head, as he simultaneously says, “Sometimes. But sometimes it just hurts — like heartburn, but here.” He touches his midsection, just about where his scar from her bullet is. 

She realizes the significance. Her face falls a little bit. Her hands start to move of their own volition, heading toward his body. She’s inches away before she stops — she clenches her hands into fists. She softly says, “Grey.”

He says, “It’s fine.”

She is shaking her head. She pushes past all the good judgement in her head that is telling her to continue working hard to give him his space — that the only way to get him back is to give him space. She blows past all that logic and just runs with her intrusive base instinct.

She says, “You have to go see a doctor about that.”

He says, “I went to my doctor a while ago. He said everything was fine.”

“Well now it’s not fine,” she says. “So go again.”

“It only hurts sometimes,” he reasons.

“Grey, come on. It’s not a big deal. Go to the doctor and risk potentially figuring out what is going on and feeling better.”

“I  _ know _ what is wrong with me. It’s just shit in my head. I will talk to Sam about it.”

“Sam is a shrink — not a medical doctor. And no, you actually don’t know what’s going on in your body.”

“Okay, I shouldn’t have told you about this,” he says flatly, starting to internally shut down now. “I didn’t expect for you to get on my ass about this. I was just trying to be . . . more open with you.”

Such a statement is designed to make her soften and go to goo because she’s supposed to be so honored that he finally deigned her worthy of his truth. 

But actually, she kind of gets amped up and inflamed by it. 

“You told me because you  _ knew _ what I’d say about it,” she says, kind of forcefully. “And you  _ needed  _ me to say it. Go to the freaking doctor, Grey.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Sam knows that Grey is in a mood, even before he watched Grey chuck seeds at the poor ducks, making them scatter in fright. Sam knows Grey is in a mood just based on the time they have spent together. Sam is similarly not at his best. He is sleep deprived because his child has been sick with the flu and Gilly got struck down with the same flu and is just miserable about it. Sam has been doing a lot of caretaking. He has been hyper-aware that he is kind of everyone’s rock and this fact about him is kind of taken for granted.

For this reason — and because of the sleep deprivation — Sam has less patience for Grey’s repetitive talking points.

When Grey gripes about how Missandei is such a busybody who is always up in everyone’s asses, for instance, Sam just cuts through all of Grey’s bullshit and says, “Grey, she loves you and cares about you. She just wants you to go to a doctor for your  _ ongoing stomach pain. _ You are overreacting. Severely. Just go to the doctor and let her ‘win.’ By the way, it’s not healthy for you to constantly frame things as winning and losing. That kind of binary doesn’t leave a lot of room for grace.”

“Fuck,” Grey says, as he suddenly stops walking. He has doubled over.

“What? Are you okay?”

“Oh my God,” Grey grits out, pressing his palm to his abdomen. “Amazing timing. My gut is trying to fucking commit suicide right now. Oh my God, am I  _ dying?” _

“No, you’re not dying.”

“You don’t know that! You’re not a real doctor!”

“Oh my God,” Sam mutters to himself, resuming his stride, leaving Grey behind. “Why do I feel like I’m at home right now?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei is in the midst of writing reports and furtively trying to plan a family dinner for her mom’s nameday — a date that they have skipped over in years past because it felt too painful. But this year, she feels optimistically celebratory. She feels like enough time has passed that it’s okay to start remembering the joy their mother cast over all their lives. 

She’s actually in the middle of an epic text-fight with Moss because he’s being a fucking hag about the restaurant and throwing up excuses about how his kids will not want to be in a nice restaurant and will be disruptive. Missandei knows that her brother is just shit at expressing his feelings — that he is really just sore and missing their mom because they all do during this time of year — she knows that instead of simply expressing that, all he can do is be a complete and total dick to her as she  _ does all of the work _ planning something nice for their freaking family. Same old shit!

This is the energy she’s encased in when Alayaya strolls up to her desk just to ask Missy if Missy read the email Yaya sent just like, two seconds ago. Missy is like, “No, Yaya, not yet,” with a startling amount of politeness, because she’s really good at being polite to people who are kind of rude to her and treat her like she’s not quite their equal. 

As she glances at Yaya’s expectant face, Missy is like, “Oh, so you want me to read it right now? You’re going to stand there while I read your email — oh, okay.”

Missandei is toggling with Outlook when the phone on her desk rings. 

She accidentally mutters, “Sorry,” to Alayaya because she forgets that there’s nothing she should be sorry about — as she absently picks up the ringing phone. “Hello?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She cinches her blazer tighter around her body as she briskly walks to the lobby of the main building on campus — the building that accepts visitors and walk-ins. She cinches her blazer in anticipation, because that building  _ blasts _ its air conditioning and she’s always cold in it. 

Her sensible shoes make a shuffling, sometimes squeaky sound across the shiny floor. She blinks because the lights are so bright — this building has windows — and she zeroes in on the front desk people.

Cecily, one of the receptionists, wordlessly gestures in front of her when she spots Missandei.

Missandei furrows her brows as she pivots — as she turns and sees . . . a man seated in the row of chairs behind them.

She says, “Hello? You’re here to see me?”

“Missandei, right?” he asks as a formality, as he stands up. He holds out his hand to shake.

It takes her a second to recognize him.  And when she does — when she realizes that he was the dude who tried to misguidedly save her ass and get them both killed because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time — well, she still shakes his warm hand all suspicious and stunned.

She says, “How did you find me?” because it should be pretty hard to find her.

“I have my ways,” he says, grinning at her, eyes bright, squeezing her hand.

“No, really,” she repeats. “How did you find me?”

“Have dinner with me. And I’ll tell you how I found you.”

_ “Excuse me?” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey realizes that the people in his life are right — Drogo is right, his mom is right, Sam is right, Missandei is right — when he arrives at Theon’s house with a bottle of wine that he won’t drink, and Theon’s got a cheese-laden spread ready for Grey. Theon announces that it’s a fondue party!

There is Yara, Ruby, and a bunch of their shitty Ironborn friends expectantly waiting for him with smiles on their faces, which is crazy because the Ironborn are never on time. 

Ralf claps him on the back and loudly calls him champ and asks him how it’s going. 

Grey doesn’t know what to make of this.

There are crispy toast croutons lovingly baked and season by Theon waiting on plates, arranged according to flavor — for Grey.

Their faces are all expectant as he takes the first bite. Theon actually looks triumphant — like he’s very, very proud of himself.

By the fifth bite, Grey feels full — and he also has to go to the bathroom. 

He stiffly excuses himself and then walks up the stairs at a normal, not urgent pace, sliding his hand up the bannister.

And in the bathroom, he throws up the lid and then  _ vomits _ the food he just ate into the toilet bowl.

He assumes that nobody is the wiser by the time he comes down again. He doesn’t want to hurt Theon’s feelings. He doesn’t want Yara to worry about him. He doesn’t want to give their Ironborn friends material to mock him with later, when they are feeling less empathetic towards him.

He actually  _ does _ think that he can’t keep going on like this — he can’t just keep subsiding on shitty bread and shitty low-rent cheese. He suspects that Theon’s cheese is too fancy and that’s why his body revolted against it. Grey suspects that he cannot fucking keep  _ isolating  _ himself from other people because his fucked up brain won’t let him eat like a fucking normal person.

He feels like leaving a couple of hours after dinner. He hugs Theon tightly and says thank you, as Theon chuckles and squeezes him back. Grey thinks that seeing Theon happy like this is more than anyone expected for Theon — and it is amazing. Grey doesn’t yet have the capacity to want this for himself or to think that it’s even possible.

He stops off at a grocery store on his way out. He buys a bag of cheddar cheese potato chips.

That’s what he’s eating in his car as he scrolls through his phone’s contacts. 

He presses his phone to his ear. He waits.

And then he says, “What’s up? What you up to right now?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


His gut is threatening to rip itself apart, as he takes a swing and slams the golf ball neatly toward the net. Behind him, Drogo is making a lot of pregnancy jokes. Drogo mockingly wants to know how far apart Grey’s contractions are now.

“Shut the fuck up,” Grey mutters, transferring a new ball onto the tee. 

And then he jumps when he feels something blunt and hard dig in between his butt cheeks.

He grips his driver tightly, turns around, and even raises it above his head. He sees Drogo looking really innocent. 

And then he hears a sharp whistle — which makes him switch his attention to the attendant, who is totally not into how he is trying to threaten his bud with a golf club.

Grey lowers his driver, as Drogo laughs. Grey says, “I didn’t realize this range had a fucking lifeguard ruining everyone’s good time. Great pick, D.”

And then Drogo says, “Seriously, you need to go get that shit checked out,” as Drogo points his own driver at Grey’s stomach.

Obviously, obviously. Grey is coming around to this conclusion now. Fucking duh. Fucking people are always telling him shit he already knows about himself.

Rather than concede and let Drogo know that he is probably right, but fuck Drogo, it’s obvious — Grey sighs and then says, “Swap places with me. I don’t want to be in front of you anymore. You’re an asshole.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	62. Missy gets happy hour with the ladies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this ep, Missandei hangs out with the cool kids and has a hard time keeping up because she's not that cool. She has to make some decisions about her immediate future, namely if she will go on a date with her future stalker/abuser. The future love of her life is low-key in this ep, but he does have a weird freakout alone in his apartment, which makes him continue questioning his sanity. He also FINALLY GOES TO A DOCTOR OH MY GOD.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Turns out the email Alayaya was so keen on having Missandi read and tend to right away was a calendar invite out for happy hour drinks. On the invite, she saw that Arya, Yara, and Kojja were also invited, which gave Missy this zip of excitement that has resulted in her grinning from ear to ear because  _ she has finally made it.  _

It’s the first time that she didn’t have to invite herself. It’s the first time she didn’t have to cajole Yaya into hanging out with her, and Yaya didn’t randomly bring her cool friends as maybe a buffer. It’s the first time at this job that Missandei actually feels  _ included,  _ which is so important in this job because it’s so incredibly stressful and taxing  _ and _ it’s also male dominated. It’s so important for other women to have a support system of other woman in order to not feel so alone and isolated because that could lead to depression and burnout —

_ “Missandei,” _ Arya cuts in, smoothly tapping the center of the table for everyone’s attention. “Sometimes your earnestness makes me feel very uncomfortable around you.”

Missandei bashfully flushes under the dim lights — before she clamps her lips tightly shut for a brief moment. She doesn’t know Arya very well. She is just very, very impressed with Arya. Missy feels like she’s already ruining her one chance at being included in a badass female posse by being her dorky self. This is why she sheepishly says, “Sorry.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missy spends long minutes sipping from her drink and avidly listening with attentive wide eyes. Occasionally one of the others would check in with her to see if she is okay because they notice she has gone quieter — which is  _ so nice,  _ that they check in, because typically her other colleagues do not do this in this way. 

Missandei has just been letting them carry on their conversation — their inside jokes and picking up old threads that they had backburnered from previous conversations. They talk about how Arya and her real estate agent are getting along, for instance, clueing Missy onto the fact that Arya has been house-hunting for at least months now and Arya is either picky or there is a quality or a feature in a house that she is specifically looking for.

Missy just soaks it all in, because it’s so  _ cool.  _ It feels  _ so cool  _ to be included and to be part of  _ this —  _ their ongoing happy hour. Missy has learned that they do this about once a month and this is the first time they are inviting her to one of these.

  
  
  
  
  
  


To Alayaya, Missandei is being so attentive and so considerate and so  _ pathetically cute _ about being invited to hang out with them — which Yaya doesn’t think is that big of a deal? — so Yaya decides to throw Missandei a bone and offer up a topic that is centered around Missandei. 

Yaya brings up Missandei’s stalker. 

Yaya is like, “Missandei has a cute man who expended a lot of effort tracking her down because she made such an impression on him — just so he could ask her out on a date.”

“Whoaaa,” Kojja says, turning her attention to Missandei. “For real?”

Missandei would rather that drinks with the ladies didn’t entail talking about men — because they are all feminists here — but she stops herself from saying that out loud because she wants to be liked. 

Missandei has to tell them all that the impression she left on the man is bewildering to her, because he met her when she was in her hooker-wear and focused on working — and that’s not an especially accurate version of her.

“Obviously he liked the look of your tits and ass,” Yara says. “Obviously he didn’t track you down because he thought you’d be a really good conversationalist.” 

Missandei frowns. “He must have friends in law enforcement, and he must’ve asked for favors because it must be near-impossible to track me down just based on physical description.”  

“Is he good looking?” Kojja asks.

“Does it matter?” Arya retorts. “He sounds like a creep. Like, go on Tinder for a date with a hot chick with tits and an ass, dude. Don’t track down women at their place of work to corner them to ask them out.”

And then, as if Yaya did not hear what Arya pointedly said at all, as if Yaya has been embroiled in this dynamic with her friends for years and years, Yaya just leans forward and places her hand on the back of Missandei’s. She squeezes. She kind of chuckles before she says, “So, are you gonna go out with him? I know you didn’t say yes on the spot. I  _ know _ you are thinking it over.” 

“You want her to go on a date with her future abuser,” Arya says in a deadpan.

“Yeah!” Yaya says cheerfully, flying in the face of Arya’s complete and utterly withering stare. “It’s kind of cute, how she made such an impression on him that he tracked her down to get her digits!” Yaya insists. “It’s kind of romantic!”

“No, it’s not,” Arya says. “She’s going to end up with her head in his refrigerator. Trust me. It happens. I’ve seen it.”

The only one at the table who winces at this is Missandei — before she remembers that Arya leads black ops — before she realizes that oh, everyone else at the table is too cool to flinch over the casual mention of women getting dismembered, decapitated, and held as trophies in freezers,  _ okay. _ Some people are just coolly unaffected by this? Cool, cool.

“Most men are utterly useless and harmless,” Yara offers. “If Missy is that concerned about her personal safety, she can just bring her gun or a taser on the date and shoot the fucker if he steps outta line,” Yara says, probably assuming that she sounds super reasonable. “I mean, Missandei  _ does _ have a history of shooting men who step outta line.”

Kojja spontaneously cracks up at that, slapping the table before she lifts up her martini glass from of amber liquid again, her third drink. It jolts the attentions of everyone — they are realizing Kojja is kind of drunk — and so, in explanation, Kojja says, “I just remembered something stupid and funny that Xhondo said the other day. Also, I remembered that Missy does have a record of shooting men when they get outta line, so you can really depend on her to do that sort of thing.”

Missandei is blushing again.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Arya says, before taking a sip from her own glass. “The gun, I mean.”

“Yeah,” Kojja says, now orienting her attention back to Missandei, still holding a glass, sloshing just a drop of it over the brim. “Bring your gun, wear a tight and sexy dress so your stalker can remember what he likes about you, and then see where the night goes.” Then, after a short pause, Kojja loudly adds, “See where your life goes! Life is about balance — and you can’t keep waiting for Nudho to get his shit together, forever, babe.” 

“Who is Noodle?” Arya asks.

“Nudho,” Kojja corrects — causing Arya to roll her eyes because that’s not freaking helpful at all. 

And then Yaya explains, “Grey. Nudho is Grey.”  

“Oh,” Arya says. And then she makes a face — a mystifying face that sort of contains a surprisingly large amount of disgust. Her stare on Missandei is very direct and very unwavering — kind of like she is interrogating. She says, “You are interested in Grey?” 

“Is that okay?” Missandei asks cautiously. She is not realizing that Arya is also a little bit lit, because Arya drunk is a lot like sober Arya. “You look . . . disturbed by this.”

“I don’t look disturbed at all,” Arya says decisively, not changing the expression on her face at all. “Grey is great. I respect the guy very much. I just didn’t know you were . . . into him.”

“Why do you look so unhappy?” Missandei repeats. “Is it because of the non-fraternization policy?”

“Fuck that policy,” Arya gripes. “We’re not fucking children. And I don’t know what you’re talking about. You like Grey. He’s lovely. You’re lovely. It’s cool. I don’t care.”

Missandei directs her attention to the rest of the table. She says, “Guys — I’m not crazy, right? You see her face?”

“Honestly, Miss, her face looks like that all the time,” Kojja says.

“Yeah, I wasn’t gonna say — but this is awkward,” Yara says.

Arya lets out a low whistle, which fogs up her glass a little bit before she downs the rest of it — a modest amount — as the ice rearranges itself against her lips. 

After she drops her empty glass to the table and starts to make eyes at their server again, her voice is pitched lower as she says, “Wow, so you are just commenting on my face, just like that? Wow.” 

Missandei is flushing so hard.

And then the entire table — everyone except Missandei — erupts in laughter. Like, Yara is even slapping her knee and rattling the table. Like, Kojja is snorting. 

And Missandei is confused.

She asks, “Wait, was that a joke? Is that a bit you guys do together?”

None of them answer her — half of the table didn’t even hear her over the sound of their own laughing. 

Missandei is the one frowning now — because she’s starting to think that she was invited to badass women happy hour in order to be the butt of all jokes because they got bored hanging out with just each other and wanted to mix it up for themselves. This isn’t the truth at all, but Missy is limited in  _ this type _ of female friendship. Her female friends are married women that she’s known from college, her sisters in law, who are also married women, and Daenerys, who is hard to describe. 

“Missy, don’t you want to have sex with a penis again?” Yara asks — loudly and crassly and completely carelessly. “Versus not having any sex at all?”

The entire table erupts in giggles and laughter again — Kojja rolls into Yaya and laughs into Yaya’s shoulder — as Missandei reacts really dramatic by dropping her jaw and letting it hang all the way open for a moment. 

“Wow!” Missandei says, feeling all sorts of indignant and defensive about this  _ right away. _ “That’s so — Wow! I don’t even — Grey can still have sex, you know! It’s so shitty to say that because of what happened to him, he can’t have sex! Sex isn’t centered around a penis, you know!”

“Oh, I  _ know,” _ Yara drawls, super casually — and also super amused that Missandei just told  _ her _ that sex isn’t centered around a penis. “I didn’t mean to imply that he can’t fuck. I was more saying that Grey has been pretty steadfast in his refusal to fuck _ you,  _ so maybe it’s time to cut your losses.” Yara starts to chuckle here — dark and a little snarky. “Just go on a date with your stalker, you maniac!” she decrees. “Give the new guy a chance! You might like him!”

And at this point — Missy is just stunned. She has nothing left locked and loaded to fight back with. She is actually stinging from the part when Yara told her that it’s clear that Grey is straight up refusing to have sex with her — and everyone she works with apparently knows this.

Missandei hangs her head in shame and embarrassment.

“Too far,” Yaya says, reaching out to pat Missandei’s shoulder, also trying not to smile too obviously because she thinks Yara is hilarious. “I think you went a touch too far, Other Y.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


After briefly talking to Dany and her dad about this, Missandei decides she probably also needs to talk to Grey before she goes on a date with her future abuser. 

That was a joke that her dad was not at all impressed by. He didn’t find it funny at all.

He also did an about-face. He told her that he has come around on Grey, whether it’s the months of imprisonment plying out empathy or the few times they met and Grey high tailed it from the house in a puff of anxious smoke — that kid is very polite, her dad had told her. Her dad says he has gotten used to the idea of Grey. 

Dany distinctly did not want to give an opinion on this, because Dany was afraid of overstepping and blowing up their friendship again. Dany just told Missy to fuck whoever she wanted to. Missy had to be like, no really, Dany, should I go on a date with my future abuser?

With a put-upon sigh, Dany said she had no idea. This is not an area she has expertise in.

So very awkwardly, Missandei decides to try and schedule a time to take the temperature on their relationship — or lack of relationship — in the middle of a night shift. It’s because it seems like he’s been straight up avoiding her, maybe ever since their little argument in Dany’s apartment about his stomach pains.

Missandei doesn’t realize that he’s been getting hassled a lot by his people — by not only his mom, but also Drogo and his friends. Drogo and his mom want him to go to the doctor. He’s pissed off that Drogo is still such a narc. And he’s tired of Tal and Daario and Robb constantly asking him when they are all gonna hang out and cash in on Grey’s promises in New Ghis. When are they going to get a fun night out with him?

He’s not handling it all especially well. 

And on her end, she actually doesn’t intend to talk so personally with him while they are working — she doesn’t intend to blindside him — but it’s been hard to reach him. So when she asks him if he’d like to grab a bite to eat sometime in the next week while there is a lull in work, he straight up says, “With you?” as he looks at her in confusion underneath his baseball cap.

Which makes her blush really hard — it makes her heart start to pound. 

It also makes Daario softly gasp in their ears — a comical sound if they weren’t both so tense — reminding them both that they don’t have privacy. 

She stops herself from backtracking — and from thinking about why this man has to  _ constantly  _ reject her in brutal ways whenever she asks him out to dinner. She just nods quickly and says, “Yes, with me.”

“I don’t really do dinner anymore,” he reluctantly says, kind of shrugging. He breaks eye contact and he adopts this far-away expression on his face. Even in the dark, she sees him clenching his jaw. He thinks that she wants to corner him and talk to him,  _ again, _ about his stomach and his health. And he is just feeling a lot of stress about that. He doesn’t want to have dinner with her and listen to her list out all the reasons she is disappointed in him and how slow he is to do shit that is healthy for him. 

He  _ knows.  _ He fucking  _ knows. _

She doesn’t intuit that he’s nervous about his stomach — and nervous about being around her with when he is mystifyingly ill. She doesn’t understand that he’s scared to let her find out that he can only eat a very specific genre of food. She doesn’t understand that he’s scared that she will see so much evidence of his disordered mental state — of his lack of advancement in his own mental health. He’s nervous about her being privy to this really unpleasant and unceasingly consistent horseshit that keeps circling around him. 

So of course she misreads his curtness and his shut down. Of course she feels hurt by it. So for the rest of their shift, they just continue working professional and largely silently. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


When Grey tiredly arrives home at four in the morning after a work shift, the skin on the back of his neck condenses into goosebumps. He immediately deeply believes that something weird is going on — something is just fucking  _ off —  _ there is a different smell in the air and maybe some of his things have been touched and moved — like his stack of mail, like the collapsed boxes of cardboard he was going to take out to the bins.

Right away, he pulls his gun out, flicks the safety off, loads a round, and then holds it up and pointed out in front of him. 

He lightly kicks the wall with his foot. His voice is deep and firm as he says, “Is someone there?”

There is no answer from within the dark apartment, so he keeps his gun up as he reaches out to flick on his light switch. He keeps the front door to his apartment open a crack, in case he needs to run.

He says, “Hello? Is someone there?” as he presses his back against the adjacent wall of the guest bedroom and reaches out to twist the knob — which unlatches easily. He tells himself that if this all turns out to be fucking  _ nothing,  _ he’s going to feel a little bit fucking ashamed for being so off his game.

When he pivots into the room with his gun aimed at the center of the room, at the bed, his previously steady heart starts to jackhammer in his chest, throat, and face. He  _ immediately  _ breaks out in a hot sweat and lowers his arms. 

There is  _ nothing.  _ There is no intruder in his home.

His hands quickly clears the gun, clicking the safety back on. He quickly slides his gun back into its holster, feeling it bounce against his ribcage.

He runs both of his hands down his face before he backs out the room again, heading back out to the front door to shut it close.

  
  
  
  
  
  


After their shift — at sleepy four in the morning — he is delaying sleep because he feels sorry for her. She expressed wanting to have a meal, and so he is taking her out to a meal. He knows that he’s not who she wants to be with, though.

He leans forward and gently pulls her half-eaten stack of pancakes away from her. He pulls it to his side of the table and notes that it’s full of pock marks and soggy with syrup, from where she poked and prodded and fussed with it instead of eating it.

Daario cuts his fork into her pancakes, shoves the sugar-laden mass of carbs into his mouth, before he says, “Hon, we’ve known each other a long time, right? I’m starting to think your crush on Grey isn’t some ongoing and weird bit of performance art. I’m starting to think that . . . you really, really care about him.”

She sighs, as if she already knows where this is all heading. And maybe she does. Maybe this will be an inverted retread of that terrible conversation that had about his choices in life and his heartbreak due to his terrible choices in life.

“You should move on,” Daario tells her — very gently, with softness in his eyes. “Don’t be a person who loses time holding onto someone who can’t and won’t reciprocate. You deserve better than that.”

She shuts her eyes. Because this  _ is _ a retread of that horrible conversation they had when she found Dany’s hair clip at his apartment. 

“Grey is not like Dany,” she tells Daario blandly. 

“Yeah, he smiles way more.”

This makes her chuckle a little bit — unexpectedly. Her shoulders lift up and she kind of snorts as she bites back a smile.

“Atta girl,” Daario says, as he shoves more pancake into his mouth, as he simultaneously kicks her her foot underneath the table. “Wanna hang out on my boat next weekend?

  
  
  
  
  
  


He shows up to his doctor’s office already having an idea of what is wrong with him. He has been researching. A lot. He thinks he either has an inflamed appendix that has to be taken out — or it’s fucking psychosymatic and they have to run a bunch of tests to just be perplexed and not know what is wrong with him other than what is obviously wrong with him: his fucking broken brain. 

He shows up to his doctor’s office ready for it to be a grind and for nothing to be different. He shows up upset and depressed, actually.

And after a cursory set of questions that Grey easily answers — after he tells his doctor that he’s been eating like shit because his stomach can’t handle shit. He’s been battling nausea for months since getting back from work in Valyria. The nausea has only levelled up and become a dull, aching pain that is sometimes sharp and mind-numbing — Dr. Sand super duper casually says, “It sounds like you have a peptic ulcer.” 

Grey is like, “What? Are you for real? How do you know without running tests? Are you sure it’s not all in my head?”

Dr. Sand quirks a brow — and then she calmly says, “We’ll confirm it with a test. But all signs point to ulcer, Grey. Why would be in your head, Grey? Do you not think the pain and discomfort you’ve been feeling is real?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She shows up to lunch in a turtleneck, a pair of khakis, and a blazer. She basically shows up to her date in her drab work clothes — something that her dad notes and pointed out to her with a quirk of the brow. She wanted to blow off his wisdom and accuse him of kinda being arrogant and full of it ever since he found it within himself to have feelings for a person after losing love. She gets that such an accomplishment can go to someone’s head and make then push for idealism all of a sudden instead of pragmatism. 

She also doesn’t think her wardrobe choices are prophetic. She doesn’t think they give psychological insight into who she is as a person.

She covered herself up because she feels vulnerable and defensive. She doesn’t want a man to like her because he likes the look of her body parts. She crosses her arms over her breasts a lot during lunch. She answers his questions about herself and her life in clipped sentences. She allows herself to convey to him that she’s not a fun person at all — he was wrong about her.

He maintains eye contact and he keeps smiling at her with warmth. He keeps being unfazed by how guarded she is — maybe because he’s used to handling this in his line of work. He tells her that he found her because she pulled her purse out to pay for her drink that night and it was hooked over her arm. He tells her that as her colleague was chewing him out for endangering her, he accidentally got a peek at her name badge. That’s how he knows where she works and what her name is.

Missandei shuts her eyes in shame, because she this is the kind of shit Grey is always on her ass for — this kind of sloppiness.

Qotho tells her, “I wanted to meet with you to apologize, actually. I didn’t mean to come at you and scare you like that. I didn’t mean to be like — your savior. I know what it looked like. I had had a rough day — a really bad day. I think I was looking for something drastic — so that’s why I was on the street at that time of night. I was looking to like . . . I don’t know, find reasons to prove to myself that I’m a good person, maybe.”

She frowns quietly at him. “Why was your day bad?” And then self-consciously, she quickly says, “You don’t have to tell me if it’s too personal.”

“It’s okay,” he says easily. “It’s a little embarrassing. Work has been stressful — and really depressing. And I went on Facebook, which is a great place to go if you want to get more depressed. I saw that my ex-fiance is um, I’d say seven months pregnant and getting married — to my ex-best friend. She posted a picture of them together. She wrote that she has never been happier in life. I didn’t know . . . their relationship had progressed that much.”

“Oh,  _ wow,” _ Missandei breathes. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he says gently, moving the leaves of his salad around on his plate. “I feel like, it’s been  _ a year,  _ right?”

“It has been,” she says, nodding vigorously.

“What about you, Missandei? What is your story?”

  
  
  
  
  



	63. Sam's day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A day in the life of Samwell Tarly. It's a doozy.

  
  
  
  
  


When Sam tells Gilly that he’s unsure whether he can take the time off from work to take care of Little Sam while Gilly’s sister is visiting — well, the frigid silence that his wife responds with leaves a lingering impression. It makes Sam vow to talk to the supervisor and see if he can get the coverage needed to take a few days off.  

He and Gilly’s relationship has morphed with the preparation and arrival of Little Sam. He finds that perhaps they were shortsighted in naming their son after him. It may have ensured that Gilly’s increasingly divided attention will always land on her favorite Sam, leaving her husband to largely subside on her tolerance of him most days. 

They keep telling each other that it will be different when Little Sam is older and less needy. They keep sleepily fantasizing about having a date night again someday. 

Grey and mentions of Grey have become persona non grata in their household — not that Gilly holds the one time Grey needed Sam to pick him up from the police station against him. And it’s also not that Grey’s imprisonment and detainment in Valyria didn’t concern her and draw out empathy.

It’s because, from her vantage point and due to her own expertise in these matters, she thinks her husband has crossed boundaries and his investment in his client-patient is no longer strictly professional. Gilly thinks that Sam’s emotional investment in Grey has become a bit of an obstacle and a hindrance — not just to her husband’s mental wellbeing, but also probably to Grey’s own healing.

Outwardly, on the surface of his mind, Sam thinks that his wife is full of crap and doesn’t know Grey or his work with Grey. She doesn’t see the progress and the marked difference between the Grey of today and the Grey that he first met. When he first met Grey, Grey was manipulative and a habitual hider and liar. These days, Grey strives to be honest with him most of the time.

Internally — and constantly — Sam doubts himself. He worries that he’s not helping Grey at all. He agonizes over the idea of suggesting that Grey find another therapist — because he does not think that Grey would do well with Margaery and he knows that Grey cannot effectively see a therapist outside of the organization because there would be so much that Grey could not disclose about himself for security reasons. 

Sam kind of feels like he keeps pushing forward because he is all that Grey’s got. Sam also simultaneously feels like it’s a lot of pressure and he’s not at all convinced that being ‘all that Grey’s got’ is even good enough.

He delays going to bed for perhaps an hour. Gilly gives him a knowing look, but she leaves it without commenting. She just brushes his shoulder as she walks past, asks him if he’d like the light on the living room on or off — he tells her on. He also tells her that he’ll come to bed really soon.

It’s a small lie. He ends up flipping open Grey’s file and reading through his own notes. He reads over notes of what might be the physical manifestation of Grey’s emotional pain. He reads evidence of years worth of withdrawing from people and avoidance of vulnerability. He reads over the touch points he’s somewhat arbitrarily picked out as areas that trauma has affected Grey the most — for the worse. He has had to categorize the trauma, because Grey has experienced a great  _ variety _ of it. 

Sam worries about his own capabilities. He did not go to a top tier school. He did not stand out in his class at a mid-tier school. He is not widely published. He may not be  _ good enough  _ or  _ educated enough  _ to give Grey the help that Grey truly needs.

And largely because of Grey and Grey’s quiet derision, Sam is now also hyperaware that he is very white. It took him a stunning amount of time to come to this — in the thick of adulthood — for this to resonate within him, as something that matters in his line of work. 

Sam opens his book — he prefers real books made of paper — and resumes his reading. 

He has been reading  _ a lot  _ about race-based traumatic stress, trying to catch up enough to be  _ helpful.  _

  
  
  
  
  
  


When Sam asks Grey how Grey is doing the next time they see each other, Grey bitterly tells Sam that he is shitting brown water out of his ass and it is great. And that is all that Grey says.

Sam, now fairly used to Grey’s often-oblique and stingy communication style, starts mining for the necessary details for it all to make sense. Sam is the kind of person that always thinks about his audience and provides contextual information for them — he tends to be a storyteller. Grey, in contrast, sometimes resents information-giving. He has an aversion to what he sees as a simplistic presentation of himself — which is something he feels he has to embody for work, all the time. This is why, in private moments, he so often drops information in mystifying spurts. Grey sometimes makes it hard for people to understand him — on purpose.

Sam has called it a great distancing technique. Grey often appears like he thinks Sam’s assessments are distasteful or inaccurate.

“Your stomach symptoms now include . . . diarrhea?” Sam guesses.

“No,” Grey says stonily, walking to the edge of the fountain to look at whether it’s cold enough outside for the water to have a skin of ice on it. “I mean, I have diarrhea. But it’s not a symptom.”

Then, after a bit of silence, Sam patiently asks, “If it’s not a symptom, then what is it? Why did you bring this up?”

“It’s from the antibiotic I’m taking,” Grey explains. “It’s killing a lot of bacteria in my stomach — the good — and the bad.” And then, after a sighing, as if it is labor intensive for him to share so much, Grey says, “I went to see a doctor about my stomach pain. She told me it’s an ulcer. She wrote me a prescription for a pretty basic, pretty low-grade antibiotic. It’s killing all the bugs inside me and giving me liquid poop.”

“Oh, well,” Sam says, pausing. “That’s good, right?”

“The diarrhea?” Grey asks quizzically.

“The cure, Grey,” Sam clarifies. “The treatment.”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Grey mutters, resuming his circumnavigation around the pond. “Who knows if it will even work though.”

“ _ Is it _ working? Do you have a sense of it yet? How long has it been since you’ve been taking antibiotics?”

“Three days,” he answers. “I’m supposed to go for two weeks.”

“Do you feel better?” Sam presses.

“I’ve been shitting weird,” Grey says. And then reluctantly, he adds, “My stomach pain has subsided. It was actually freaky, how fast it went away. Like, in a day.”

“That’s really great, Grey!” Sam enthuses — because he knows the stomach pain has been a great source of stress for Grey — because he wants Grey to feel better.

Grey casts a quick look at Sam. He bitterly says, “Is it great though, Sam? Is it? Because what this tells me is that I’ve been suffering for fucking  _ months —  _ like an  _ idiot — _ over something that  _ amoxicillin,  _ sauerkraut, and yogurt can fix.” He scoffs at himself. “I’m a fucking  _ moron.” _

“Hey now,” Sam says gently. “You’re actually one of the smartest people I know. Go easy on yourself. We all avoid the doctor for various reasons. I’m afraid to go and learn my cholesterol is high and I might be pre-diabetic, for instance.”

“Sam,” Grey says flatly. “Stop relating to me. Stop  _ empathizing.  _ It makes me uncomfortable.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey tells Sam that as his own dunderheadedness sunk in — deeply in — he started entertaining the idea that maybe he will — someday soon — be able to participate in Taco Tuesday again. Like, he may be able to eat food more indiscriminately again. 

Grey wonders out loud of it was the fucking Valyrians that did this to him — and whether or not they did this on purpose or purely by accident. He wants to know what shit they put in their mushy food that inoculated him with shitty ulcer-causing bacteria. He muses that those fuckers are brilliant.

And it takes Sam a slow second to realize Grey is joking — because this is how Grey jokes sometimes. He jokes because he feels more okay expressing the things that deeply trouble him if he can wrap it up in humor. His truth feels less real that way. Again, this is another way in which he distances himself from the things that make him feel emotionally vulnerable.

Grey slowly tells Sam that — maybe — he had started to think that maybe — he could eat with his friends again.

Then Grey pauses.

Sam pinpoints what this is — easily. Sam says, “You mean Missandei. You are thinking about being able to spend more time with Missandei now that your stomach isn’t a huge point of distraction, right?”

“I mean, sort of,” Grey mutters. “But like, she’s seeing someone. So she’s busy.”

“What? She’s seeing someone? What does that mean?”

“It means what I just said, man,” Grey says snappishly. “She’s  _ dating _ someone.”

“Oh, Grey, I’m  _ sorry.” _

Of course, Sam already knows the response that he is sure to get even before he gets it. 

Grey says, “There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. She’s allowed to date. She’s allowed to do whatever she wants. What is there to be sorry for?”

“I know you care about her a lot,” Sam offers. “I know there’s a part of you that thinks about being with her and that wants to be with her. So it must be hard for you to see her spending time with someone that you might feel . . . is supplanting that role that might have felt like it was . . . reserved for you.”

“It’s not,” Grey says — still forcefully bland and unreadable. “It’s fine. It’s better this way anyway.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Their session continues to feel somewhat adversarial and antagonistic purely on Grey’s end. The rest of the session feels labor intensive and reductive to Sam. 

Sam understands that Grey is actually pretty upset at over the latest development. Sam has plenty of doubts over Grey’s interpretation and recap of events. Sam is tired and today, he wishes that, for today, Grey would just come right out and say what he is feeling. 

Sam worries that Gilly is right in all of the uncomfortable ways — like in ways that result in Sam abandoning Grey.

Sam realizes that the word abandonment reveals his emotional attachment to Grey — too much. It is probably a touch too much. 

Their fight — completely unexpected as it is — is born from this kind of professional anxiety. Their first real fight ever comes from the fact that Grey is currently highly emotional but also highly repressed — and the fact that Sam is at a low point in his belief in himself and his abilities. The fight comes about because they are both very insecure.

“Why don’t you talk to her?” Sam suggests.

“What do I even need to talk to her about?” Grey says snappishly, really triggered by that. “She has a boyfriend. I have my wet poops. We all have shit, Sam. Does everything fucking need a deep and emotional examination? Can’t I just fucking  _ live?” _

_ “Are _ you living though?” Sam asks — almost shocked by how challenging his tone sounds. 

His voice actually causes Grey to stop walking altogether. It causes Grey to stop and turn to face Sam head-on — reminding Sam a bit of high school actually. Because it feels  _ intimidating. _

So Sam doubles down — perhaps misguidedly.  Sam says, “From where I’m standing, it doesn’t actually look like you are living — because living entails  _ engaging. _ You are just  _ existing, _ Grey. And  _ existing _ is not  _ living.” _

“Are you fucking _ shitting me  _ right now?” Grey says, now crossing his arms over his chest. “Did you really just say that to me  _ just now?” _

Sam sighs. He swallows the lump in his throat. He hates confrontation. He about to backtrack and smooth things over. He says, “Grey —”

“You act like I’m not  _ trying!”  _ Grey shouts — his face, his expression, cracking for the briefest of moments. 

He looks hurt for a moment — and it cuts Sam deep. 

“You’re talking to me like I fucking _want this_ and like I _asked for this_ and like it’s _easy_ for me to just _turn off,”_ Grey continues. “Well, it’s _not._ Or maybe I’m fucking _stupid._ Because I’ve been spending the last few days thinking I’m fucking _stupid_ , instead of what I’ve been thinking for the last six months — which is that I’m fucking _crazy._ Fuck you, Sam. Why do I even bother?”

The ‘fuck you’ hit Sam’s ears really aggressively — and this is one of the lines in the sand that Sam has set for himself, on a personal level. He set it for himself based on his experiences growing up with the kind of father that he had. At one point in life, Sam decided that he would no longer tolerate being talked to like that. 

The ‘fuck you’ makes Sam forget his training. It just immediately pulls out this instinctive and self-protecting response. 

He says, “This is what you do, Grey. This is what you’re really good at. You are very good at manipulating people into giving up on you. You made your parents give up on you. You are right on track in the course of getting Missandei to give up on you. And now you are working so hard to get  _ me _ to give up on you. Is this what you want your life to be?”

They are past time — Grey is going to be late for a meeting and Sam is going to be late for his next appointment. 

Before Grey cuts this off and just leaves, he sarcastically says, “Yeah, man. That’s my goal in life. To be alone and unloved and unremembered.” He shakes his head at Sam. And then he says, “Fuck  _ this,”  _ and he means therapy. He means fuck therapy. 

And then he turns around and leaves with his hands digging into the pockets of his coat.

  
  
  
  
  
  


When Sam gets home, he doesn’t have much time to decompress because he gets thrown back into the thick hubbub of caring for a child who is learning how to move and how to walk and how to destroy and eat inappropriate things. He balances cooking dinner with looking after his son so that Gilly can get a break.

She spends that break on her computer — probably on social media or looking at things to buy online because she shops to manage her stress sometimes. And then she gripes and complains about how they need to save more money but are so bad at it. 

It drives Sam a little nuts today. 

He puts down a couple of steaks and literally, a potato mash in the center of their kitchen — because he’s not a good cook and these are the two things he can do. Gilly balances feeding herself with feeding Little Sam. They don’t really talk much to each other, save for the moment Gilly follows up and asks Sam if Sam asked his work about taking a few days off.

Sam immediately shuts his eyes — in regret and also self-hatred.

His wife reads him right away. She says, “You forgot.”

“Sorry,” he says quickly. “I had . . . a distracting day.”

“Sam,” she says wearily.

“I’ll ask tomorrow,” he promises.

“I really need to know, so I can plan,” Gilly explains. 

“I know, hon. Sorry.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


When Sam logs onto his work computer to check his emails — after he shuts his book and calls it a night — he finds that Grey has canceled not only their next session, but has actually cancelled the  _ entire series _ . There is a calendar notification of this. It’s a one-sided notification. Sam gets no say in this. 

Sam gets ready for bed kind of numb — it’s too early for him to be really sad and upset about it — he is just tired and spent.

As he brushes his teeth, he tells himself that he has really fucked up — he has fucked up so badly because he is so flawed and so limited. This is all his own fault. Whatever terrible thing happens to Grey from here on out — is going to be all his fault.

His side of the bed is cold when he crawls into it. It makes him absently wondering if his son is warm enough — so he gets back up to go check on his son. 

He touches his kid’s sleeping face in the dark. He starts to get a little teary about it. He knows he’s being self-indulgent, when he wonders if he is going to be a good father to this person, if he is capable of it. 

He ends up reaching out and holding tightly onto his wife when he finally makes it back to their bed. He grabs her and slides her to him — making her hiss sleepily as her skin drags against the cold sheets. He hugs her tightly to himself.

She wakes up — a little bit — enough. She whispers, “What time is it?”

He doesn’t answer her.

So she answers herself. She says, “It’s late.”

He maintains his silence — because now he is afraid of what has happened.

She says, “Sam, are you okay? Honey?” as she searches in the dark for his hand. She clamps her fingers down hard on his wrist. She searches for his pulse.

  
  


 

 


	64. Missy is also sick

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grey and Missy are really a match made in heaven. In this ep, Missy is also sick and happens to also be TERRIBLE at taking it easy and resting and healing. She just barrels forward with her life and her routine as the love of her life is off-screen, probably being really in his feelings. Missy meets a new friend this ep, gets teased a lot about her love life, and then spits in Drogo's food. Aw, that's our girl.

  
  
  
  


 

Grey has to take a night off and bow out of a late shift because his poop situation makes it logistically difficult to be far away from a toilet, and he doesn’t want Missandei to get into a mishap because he’s not around to watch her back because he’s too busy shitting himself in some bushes. 

He requests a sick day from Drogo very regretfully and with a shit ton of guilt. Even though Drogo has known Grey for years, Drogo still manages to be mildly surprised by the disproportionate amount of guilt. Drogo says, “It’s not a big deal, man. Take the night off.”

Before Grey takes off of work to go chill at home with a sore ass hole and his damning memories of the stupid and petty things that he said to Sam and the damning things that Sam said back to him — she intercepts him at his desk as he’s packing up his laptop — he plans to work at home for the rest of the night because . . . what else is he going to do? 

Missandei’s face is eager and bright. She touches her fingertips to the clean flat top of his desk. She spies the plant that she gifted him, literally years ago. It’s been nearly two years since he slapped her in the face, and she expressed gratitude for it by giving him a plant. 

She rubs a shiny green leaf in between her fingers. She says, “Ooh! This little dude has grown so much! You’re good at plants!”

And he just generally feels _ miserable _ underneath the glare of her patronizing attention. He feels unnecessarily insecure and nervous about himself and that makes him feel uncomfortable and awkward. He feels kind of sad because an inevitability that he anticipated has come to pass — and knowing that it was an inevitability didn’t even lessen the sting of it.

“Are you okay?” she asks softly, the smile on her face fading and turning downward now. “Are you feeling sick?”

He remembers their disagreement. He remembers her being fed up with him because he wouldn’t go to the doctor. He thinks that she’s being extra careful with him because she’s with someone new, and she thinks he’s too fragile and needs to be handled with kid gloves.

He realizes that if he wasn’t so fucking rash and impulsive, he could be talking about this shit with Sam later, instead of destructively only letting it live on and fester in his fucking broken brain.

“Kind of,” he mutters, avoiding eye contact.

And before she can respond, they get interrupted.

From across the room, Tyrion yells, “Missandei! I’m going to transfer a call to you! It’s your boyfriend!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


After Missy finishes talking to Davos — who had a pretty simple question about translation software that he opted  _ not  _ to just Google himself — who instead opted to workshop around the question with his colleagues like an old person before landing on Tyrion, who recommended Missandei as a good source of information — well after all of  _ that  _ and she disconnects from the call and pulls off her headset — her eyes rescan the room for Grey. 

She sees that his desk is empty and his computer is asleep. He must’ve gone home while she was on the call.

She frowns. She had wanted to say goodbye to him.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei spends the few hours in between her daytime work hours and her nighttime work hours in the gym. She runs five miles with music pounding in her ears. 

She mostly thinks what he must be doing right now — if he is still feeling ill, if his stomach is bothering him still. She’s been worried that he might have some sort of abscess in there, it might be a kidney stone that he is having a hard time passing, or it might be because she shot him and left him behind in Valyria, just tearing him up physically and mentally and emotionally forever. It could be that.

She drags a tight tank top over her body in the locker room, about an hour before she’s slated to head out with her team. She absently tries to remember when she transitioned from baby doll dresses to  _ this. _ She  _ does _ remember Alayaya prophetically telling her that one day, this kind of work would feel second nature. 

It feels second nature  _ now. _

She climbs into the van with a big puffy down jacket on. She’s been empathizing a lot with the sex workers out there. Wintertime is both terrible and a boon for their work. Cabin fever makes men act out. The coldness and the holidays keep them inside and uncomfortable. The number of dissatisfied, entitled men out there because the holiday has slowed down work is troubling. Their team has been especially busy.

In the van, Missy is pushing the hood of her coat down and off of her head when Daario asks, “How was your date with Mr. Perfect?”

This piques Robb’s interest. Robb is like, “Ooh! You went on a date with someone perfect? Tell us about him!”

And Missandei has to be like, “No, Robb. Shut up, Daario.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Sitting right on the floor, in the corner of her kitchen, Missandei pulls out her mom’s recipe cards — these notes that Missandei laminated after she made her mom remember and write down everything a month or so after learning the cancer had come back. 

Missy kind of regrets laminating the cards. Her mind had been on preservation. Her past self didn’t anticipate that she would kind of pang for the feel of paper in between her fingers instead of plastic.

Her mom used to cook based on instinct and feel. There are inherent inaccuracies in the recipes — because her mom guessed and never made recipes using cups or teaspoons. Her mom used to pour streams of liquids, powders, and spices from her palm and from in between her fingers. None of the recipes are written by the finger-full.

Missy banished her dad from the house — made him go spend a few hours with her brothers. Their chosen activity was driving an hour to go into the mountains to do target shooting. They took the older kids. 

She wants the meal to be a surprise. She runs upstairs to hop in the shower real quick and pull on a sweater dress before her house explodes in a ruckus of noise and activities as the kids rush in, already screaming the rules of a new made up game.

“You smell good,” Mars says, leaning down to kiss her on her on the cheek. “Weird.” He has a bottle of wine in his fist.

She makes a face at him. “I smell good sometimes!”

“Sure, okay, if you think so,” he mutters, going straight to the stove to see what she’s cooking. He lifts a pot lid and goes, “Are we going to die eating this?”

They light a candle of remembrance for their mother. Kaden knocks it over because he slams into the table during a game of tag with his sisters and cousins. His mom and dad simultaneously scream at him as the wax goes everywhere. Missy has to rush over to her dad to get her dad to stop cleaning because this is kind of his day — but her dad tells her she doesn’t know how to clean and wax is difficult to get out of carpet.

He doesn’t mean for it to hurt — he says it quickly — and he never realizes that he cut her with that statement. 

She spends the rest of dinner with a fake smile plastered on her face — as her family continuously tell her that the food she made is nothing like the food that their mom used to make. She lets Mars and Moss rag on her because she thinks that they need this — they need to give her a bit of shit so they don’t get too sad.

Her sisters-in-law help her clean up after dinner as her brother and dad chat about work stuff, as their dad tells them stories about what it used to be like, way back in the day. They compare notes across beer bottles, and she can hear their laughter.

She smiles as she gives all of her nieces and nephews big, bracing hugs, as she embraces her sisters, as she gets picked up by both of her brothers in the course of saying goodbye.

She squeezes her dad’s shoulder when they are alone again. She looks at the clean kitchen. She asks him, “Did you have a nice day?”

“I certainly did,” he says, patting her hand on his shoulder. “Did you?”

“I did!” she says, plastering another smile on her face.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Yara gets crass with her during Taco Tuesday — as Missy is dotting her tacos with hot sauce that she brought to the cafeteria from her desk drawer. Yara actually snatches the sauce out of Missandei’s hand before Missy is done with it, starts dotting her own tacos as she scrolls through her phone, and then asks, “So have you gotten your tunnel plowed by Dorky-Do-Right yet? Did he get shit done or not? Did he get you off or is he shitty?”

Missandei honestly does not get why Yara honestly thinks that this is an okay way to talk to people. 

Missy starts to say, “Um —”

_ “What!”  _ Yara exclaims, still staring down at her phone. “Miss! Check out how many zits this pig has! I didn’t realize pigs get zits! Look! They’re popping these pimples.”

Yara nudges her phone closer to Missandei’s vantage point — enough for Missy to catch a glance of the video.

Missy says, “Oh God,” as she uses her hand to cover the screen.

Yara slaps Missandei’s obstructing hand away.

  
  
  
  
  
  


At Gendry’s desk, she catches Grey haltingly inviting a bunch of their colleagues out to dinner — and of course she notices that Grey has been avoiding her and has made no moves to invite her also. 

So she invites herself — because she honestly deserves to be there. She was on the team. She did the work. She was promised a nice dinner on his dime. Also, Gendry wasn’t on the team, yet even Gendry is invited.

She says, “What time and where are we meeting?” with a certain directness and a stare.

Robb answers for Grey. Robb kindly says, “Martie’s. Next Saturday. Seven sharp!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She thought Daario was completely joking about going on his boat in this frigid weather, but he was not. He actually takes a lot of time frankly mansplaining how seawater works to her. He tells her about why the ocean doesn’t freeze over — it’s because the salt in the water lowers the freeze temperature to below zero. It’s also because the current is constantly sloshing the water around and moving water doesn’t freeze.

“What about the Artic?” she asks him, bundled up in her down jacket. She asks him this just to be a dick. Because he is annoying her right now.

“It’s just really cold up there,” he tells her dismissively, backing the boat away from the dock. She can see his breath manifest as cloudy puffs as he talks to her over the rumble of the engine. She can see her own breath and feel the slow drip of snot coming out of her nose.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She is a few minutes late getting to the space because she had a hard time parking because everyone is trying to get home from work right now. 

She signs herself in on the clipboard and writes her name down on a sticker name tag — after she ducks into a small room full of people under bright yellow office lights. She tucks some of her curls behind her face, because they were making her cheek itch. She gets herself a cup of hot cocoa just to have something to do — something to occupy her hands with so that she doesn’t feel a little out of place.

She takes a seat in the third row, toward the middle. She notes that the orientation is starting a little late — something Qotho warned her has a tendency of happening.

Missandei covers her warm face with the crook of her elbow and then coughs into her sleeve.

  
  
  
  
  
  


After the question and answer session — she didn’t ask any questions — just listened and observed, after they are done for the night and she said a quick hello and goodbye to Qotho, who was busy with program logistics the entire night — Missandei waits for her turn to speak with the trainer by standing in a short line.

Missy had forgotten to throw away her cocoa cup, so she has to transfer it to her left hand in order to shake hands with the trainer. She leans forward and kind of awkwardly says, “Hello, I just wanted to say that I really, really got a lot out of your presentation — I was just — you’ve made such an impression on me. Thank  _ you _ for sharing your experiences and for being brave. My name is Missandei, by the way.”

The other woman laughs — amused by Missandei’s slight nervousness. She takes Missandei’s hand and shakes it. 

She says, “Gilly. Nice to meet you.”

“Oh, I know your name already. I mean, it was written in the program.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She knows she’s full-blown sick by the time steak dinner night with him — and friends — rolls around. She’s leaking snot constantly from her face if she’s not heavily medicated on antihistamines. She’s at the fever stage of this cold — so she feels simultaneously and uncomfortably hot and cold all at once. She is pounding Benadryl, enough to be scared enough to look up whether or not it’s possible to overdose on Benadryl and die from that.

And she’s drinking lots of coffee to keep herself awake so that she doesn’t get knocked out from the Benadryl. 

She persists though she is ill — a fact that disgusts and pisses off Drogo because he sometimes likes to look for things to be bothered about, when it comes to her. She knows that he would not bat much of an eye if Sandor came into work with some sniffles. She knows that Drogo wouldn’t stop meetings to try and call out Sandor for being “asshole patient zero.”

When she descends the stairs, she finds that her dad is hanging out with Bettie in the kitchen. They are drinking tea. And while Missandei still wonders what her dad sees in Bettie from time to time — it’s that’s not the foremost thing on her mind right now. 

“Baby,” her dad says. “You don’t look good.”

Missy pats her hair — the poof-bun she gathered on top of her head. She says, “I beg to differ, Daddy.” She knows her edges do not look amazing.

“Are you sure you don’t just want to stay home and relax? It can get the couch ready for you just like how your mom used to — remember?”

Missy refrains from sarcastically saying  _ of course _ she remembers! Her sick days on the couch with her mother taking care of her is one of her many enduring memories of childhood and her mom. 

She is a little cranky because she doesn’t feel very good.

She says, “I’m positive, Dad.”

“Lemon helps,” Bettie says mildly.

Missy kind of wants to say something like: well, fuck you, Bettie. You are not my mother. She is dead.

But she doesn’t. 

She just says, “Maybe!” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


The entire table literally groans when she shows up, bundled up in a thick wool scarf that covers half of her face, including her mouth, an overcoat, and a knit sweater and dressy sweatpants underneath. A bunch of her male colleagues and Brienne look at her in shock disgust. 

Taking a free seat — the very last one — Missy says, “What?” with her voice pinched and a little nasal. “I like free steak, too. Don’t I deserve free steak?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Her mere presence kind of drags down the spiritedness of the evening. When Tal announces that he wants to order a drink that comes in a snifter and Drogo snarkily says, “So, brandy?” Missandei takes in deep breath and roll of congested snot in her lungs audibly rumbles. It makes half of the table flinch and recoil in disgust. It’s exactly the stuff she dreamed of, back when she was an analyst dreaming of one day being part of a team that made the kind of direct impact she could see.

Fuck them all. She’s not going home. She’s going to get her dinner. She’s earned it. 

“Where’s Dork-Tales, Missandei? Why isn’t he taking care of your gross ass right now?” Yara asks. And, upon a few confused looks, she rolls her eyes and explains, “DuckTales, guys. It’s a DuckTales pun.”  

“He’s busy plowing your mom,” Missy responds — aggressively because one: She’s fucking sick of Yara’s shit-talking. And two: Benadryl and caffeine might have been a dangerous mixture.

“Good,” Yara says, nonplussed. “I’m glad she’s actually getting some for once.”

Missy is not an asshole like everyone else, except Brienne. She orders a reasonable strip cut instead of a fucking Porterhouse like the rest of the assholes, except Brienne. Brienne actually got chicken, which results in Missy getting a break. It results in about ten minutes of them getting on Brie’s butt about ordering chicken at a steakhouse, to which Brienne responded that she doesn’t love red meat and no one freaking asked her where she wanted to eat dinner at all.

“Word,” Missandei says, probably about five minutes too late, which results in confused and mildly annoyed looks.

She can’t taste her expensive fancy steak at all. It doesn’t taste dry aged to her at all. It’s okay.

She puts up with the noise as Daario tries to ask for ketchup for his steak and Tal goes  _ nuts _ over that and lectures Daario about how Daario is showing his trailer trashiness, which kind of offends Daario enough for Daario to snap back and make a bizarre speech about class and elitism and ketchup. It honestly sounds racist-y, so Tal gets sensitive about that and they both stupidly start talking about politics — as Robb shouts at them and unhelpfully says, “You both work for the same government!” over and over again.

She spends the time they are arguing taking in the scenery. She looks at the dimly like restaurant — so dark she can barely see other people at other tables. It’s also so strategically lit that she can see the individuals seated around her pretty easily. Sandor is not present because he didn’t feel like he needed to participate in group bonding on Grey’s dime — very Sandorlike. Drogo has been drinking  _ a lot,  _ but alcoholic drinks are probably like water to Drogo. Brienne looks like she has a lot of regrets — she is glumly picking at her chicken. Yara is bored and back on her phone for the time being.

She looks at him — because he’s honestly the only reason why she is here. She looks at him as he puts a lot of concentration toward cutting up his steak into little itty bitty pieces before he takes a break to slowly and carefully pop a small piece into his mouth. It’s a weirdly processed way to eat steak, but she supposes that maybe she shouldn’t be too surprised that he is process-oriented.

They lock eyes at a point — not at all accidentally because she’s been staring at him and she’s been waiting for this — for the connection.

She smiles at him when he sees her — and it’s a real smile. It’s probably her first real smile in an entire week. 

He looks blank still — and she wonders what she has done to make him so distant like this.

And then she suddenly pitches forward and — without having any control whatsoever — she loudly and violently sneeze-coughs, shooting spit and a little bit of snot right out of her mouth.

_ “Missandei!” _ Drogo shouts. He got the brunt of her germ-filled spit. “Are you fucking  _ kidding me right now!” _

“Oh man,” she says drowsily, now pulling her scarf back up her face in pretend-embarrassment. She is honestly too loopy to actually feel any sort of shame right now. “Sorry. My bad.”

  
  
  
  
  



	65. Missy and Grey have a slumber party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy and her man spend an evening together. She alternates between crying a lot, blowing her nose a lot, and being super cute a lot. Her man feels conflicted about a lot of things.

  
  


 

She misguidedly tells Drogo, her boss, to “chillax” — one of those slang words that her older nieces and nephews curl their upper lips over because they think she’s an old person trying to sound cool — and tells Drogo that she’ll buy him a replacement porterhouse if it’s so freaking important to him. 

He waves his arm grandly across the table and tells her that she actually sprayed probably half of the table — is she going to buy them all new steaks, too?

Gendry would rather not see this escalate, so he says, “It’s fine — I’m not grossed out by her, and it’s hard for me to get sick.” He digs back into his potatoes to prove a point — and Drogo looks like he’s holding in vomit.

Tal is also most definitely grossed out by her — so he throws her a deeply suspicious look and says, “I always defend you to Drogo, but now I’m seeing his point. Anyway, I was about done eating anyway.”

“You defend me to Drogo?” she asks. “Thanks, Tal!”

“Like  _ one time, _ ” Drogo interjects. _ “Calm down.” _

She pinches her expression down to withering.

  
  
  
  


When the insanely exorbitant check comes, Drogo intercepts it before Grey makes a grab. Drogo sneaks a company card down, brusquely muttering that he can’t cover the entire check — there’s a cap — but he can take a chunk of it off before Grey gets the rest.

They all expect Grey to argue and protest this based on ego — but actually, Grey just takes it stride and pops his credit card in on top of Drogo’s. 

“Thanks, Nudho!” Tal says, swaying from the multiple glasses of warm brandy — which is not at all a drink he usually drinks, thus he is unexpectedly wasted. “So what is next on the agenda?”

“Uh, I’m going home and sleeping,” Brienne says. “Thank you so much, Grey. That was very nice.”

“Yeah, thanks Grey,” Robb says.

“You’re the best, buddy,” Yara says, gesturing between herself and Gendry. “Thanks for letting us crash your party.” 

“Thanks, Grey!” Missandei says, as she dials up her smile and her cheer. 

Grey just mildly says, “No problem, guys. It was fun.” He has a takeout container of his tiny steak pieces in front of him. The table noted that Grey only ate about a third of his food and kept asking the guy all night if he hated the food or something — to which, Drogo, Grey’s one and only girlfriend, aggressively told them all to lay the fuck off his boyfriend.

“What weekend plans do you guys have?” Robb asks, as he leans forward in his chair and starts palming around for his jacket. He didn’t let the restaurant hang it up because he doesn’t go to fancy steakhouses a lot and he was caught off guard when asked. “Anything fun?”

“My dad and I are going to a pumpkin carving festival tomorrow,” Brienne says.

“You are shitting me,” Yara says, turning to face Brienne.

“His pick,” Brienne says, holding up her hands in surrender. “And actually, a lot of the carvings are really incredible.”

“No, you’re right,” Yara amends. “I’m just jealous because my dad and I don’t do cool stuff like that. We like to sit in silence, staring at the TV screen, in between the moments my dad is not yelling at my brother.”

“Oh damn,” Daario says, as a thought jars itself loose in his brain. “What’s Theon up to? How come he didn’t join tonight?”

“Ah,” Grey says reluctantly. “I actually forgot to invite him.”

“It’s cool,” Yara says smoothly. “I’m pretty sure he had plans anyway. He literally spends every weekend with his girl doing stupid shit — like, I wouldn’t be surprised if you see him and his girl at the pumpkin patch tomorrow, Brie.”

Tal is currently not about this —  _ any of this —  _ he was not expecting just dinner before they all start yawning and separating. He was expecting like,  _ way more _ debauchery because he and his friends are all booed up and often spend their time together discussing shit like property values and mushroom foraging. He thought that spending a night with single people would be at least two times rowdier than what he is used to.

“Guys,” Tal says. “It’s fucking Saturday night. Y’all don’t want to go grab a drink after this?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


While Grey is unconcerned about how Tal is going to get his ass home — probably drive a little drunk even though his ass would be fucked so hard at work if he gets a DUI — Grey is very concerned about how Missandei is going to get home. She had no drinks at dinner — besides a few sips of a hot toddy just because Yara told her it’d make her feel better. It resulted in Missandei coughing violently upon the first sip and proclaiming it disgusting. 

Besides that, she hasn’t been drinking at all.

She is not in a good state though. And predictably, she lingers and waits as everyone else says their goodbyes and depart. A few of them give her hugs — Robb, Daario, and Gendry — and the rest of them take Missandei’s offer to skip the hug because she’s a cesspool of germs.  

Grey touches her face when they are alone, out in the cold, out on the sidewalk, in front of the restaurant. He softly hisses because her face is  _ burning. _ He kind of pulls her underneath brighter lights from the window. He carefully tilts her face up to get a better look at it. He tells himself this is probably an inappropriate thing to do with someone else’s woman, but Missandei is a feminist, so she’ll probably telegraph her discomfort to him if she feels it.

He sees that there are these thick tears in her eyes. 

His brows shoot up in surprise — he’s about to ask her what is wrong.

Instead, she says, “Have you been mad at me? What did I do wrong? I’m  _ sorry _ for whatever it is. I’m  _ really sorry.” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


He feels fucking terrible — and she feels fucking terrible, too. 

He walks her the short distance to her car and helps her with the door. He waits as she not-so-carefully drops herself into the driver’s seat. He leans down to look at her again — illuminated yellow with her interior lights. 

He hands her her leftovers, which she places in the empty passenger seat. He asks her, “Are you okay to drive?”

She says, “I’m exhausted, and I feel like shit. But I’m not drunk. I’m just really sleepy and nauseous.”

“Okay,” he says, standing back up to his full height. He lightly pats the hood of her car. He says, “So I’ll see you in a bit then,” before he makes sure she has no other limbs sticking out — before he shuts the door on her.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She straight up starts bawling as she sits on a chair in Grey’s kitchen and watches him put a kettle on the stove and start pulling out canisters of pretentious teas. She sucks in a snort and starts silently dropping a lot of fat, hot tears as she watches him take out two mugs and start portioning out spoonfuls of whole leaves. 

She is crying hard and very silently because she feels so shitty and she loves him so much. And he is making tea a lot like how her dad makes tea for her, so it’s like this cute paternalistic pang — like it looks like Grey is seamlessly taking over her dad’s role as ‘man in her life.’ It reminds her that one day, her dad will die just like how her mom died — and that is just going to be  _ devastating  _ and world shattering for her. 

She simultaneously is telling herself that this is not the reality. Her dad is healthy and will probably be around for a while. And Grey is not at all  _ the  _ man in her life. She just thinks about him all the time, and is sometimes deluded about his place in her life.

That bums her out, too, so the tears don’t subside.

  
  
  
  
  
  


When he catches her alarming and largely quiet sobbing — when he sees that she is like,  _ losing it _ right now, he drops the hot cups of tea down on the table quickly. He takes the seat across from her at the table. He refrains from reaching out because he is thinking about what he’d want from a person, if he were to let himself be absolutely vulnerable like this in front of someone else. He thinks that he would not want to be treated like he is weak and fragile. He wouldn’t want to be fussed over.

So he softly says, “It’s okay,” as he slides her cup closer to her. It makes a light scraping sound. He says, “It’s herbal — no caffeine — so you should be able to sleep tonight.”

“O-okay,” she hiccups, in between the mini crying breaks. She reaches out with both hands to valiantly try and grab her cup. “T-thank you.”

“Hey, careful,” he says, reaching out to try and block her hands from the cup. “It’s really hot still.”

“Oh,” she says softly, jerking her fingers off of the ceramic when she brushes against it. “Ouch. Y-you’re right. It’s hot.”

“Yeah.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He just lets her cry it out without asking her what the cause or the impetus behind the crying is. She is discovering that this is very much his MO — a pattern. She isn’t yet quite sure how she’s supposed to feel about it. She is used to being the only girl in her family. She is used to her mom sitting her down and making her express and purge out all of her emotions and feelings. She is used to her brothers’ strong, smothering hugs because crying freaks them out. She is used to her dad’s eyes, tearing up along with her because they’ve always had a special connection.

She’s kind of used to her feelings being mirrored — and reciprocated. 

She has a tight head and compressed nasal passages by the time she is done. There are no tissues around because he didn’t think to grab any for her, so she plucks up a paper napkin and loudly blows her nose into it. 

It is loud. And wet. She feels so gross right now.

And the napkin is not enough. 

She wraps her warm, wet snot up and then pushes herself to her feet to go throw it away. She also goes on the hunt for tissues or something else to continue blowing her nose in. She looks around his kitchen.

Grey actually reappears — she didn’t even know he disappeared. He ends up nudging a fresh roll of toilet paper into her hand.

  
  
  
  


He worries and suspects that this is too much — for him and for her — for the both of them. He is not good at stuff like this — he is only good at getting yelled at or lectured to. When his mother was sobbing in his apartment, shoving wet clothes into her suitcase, and screaming at him that she and his dad cannot watch him continue to try and kill himself anymore — well, he remembers being really inert and useless in explaining himself in the face of her bewilderment and grief.

He’s not good at being there for people on the daily. He is only good at extremes — at keeping people alive in dire circumstances. He doesn’t really know how to live and exist with people in the normal and the mundane. Back when he had at least one person who understood him in the entire world, Sam used to tell him that maybe it was because Grey was born into and grew up in extraordinary circumstances. Grey tends to qualify his child as ‘normal,’ but Sam used to call Grey’s childhood ‘isolating’ and ‘lonely.’ Grey doesn’t know how his childhood could have been like that, when he had parents, a brother, and a family who loved him so much — who always tried to fruitlessly coax out these things that he was bad at giving.

He told Sam that he wasn’t good at other kinds of relationships either — back when he had more of a penis. 

It felt like this terrible, shitty secret when he finally let it out. It was like he was revealing to Sam that he  _ knows _ his circumstances aren’t the reason he has a hard time making connections. He was bad at making them his entire life. He didn’t date much when he was young. He didn’t date much in college. He has never had a person that he was responsible to, outside of his family. He just doesn't know how to be what she needs him to be and what she deserves.

She blows her nose violently for maybe the fiftieth time. There’s a small mountain of snot-soiled toilet paper in front of her. She drops the latest bundle unceremoniously. She sounds congested and not like herself, as she explains to him, “There’s no more snot, but it feels like there’s still  _ a lot _ of snot.”

 “Yeah, I get it,” he says.

“Grey,” she says, softly and apprehensively — fearfully — and also with fresh tears blooming in her eyes. “Can I just get a hug? From you? Please?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She  _ buries _ her sigh and her cry into the side of his face as he wraps his arms around her body. Her hands come up to dig into his back. She’s still sitting in a chair and he’s kneeling on the hard wood floor to get to her height. It’s awkward — and it’s still amazing. She wonders if she’s going to be chasing these crumbs from him for the rest of her life. She kind of knows that most of her friends are right — that she’s probably wrong to keep subsiding like this, kind of living a half-life. 

But he just feels  _ so nice. _

“God, you’re really hot,” he mutters. She can feel the vibration of his voice. It gives her tingles.

And it makes her laugh raspily into his cheek, as she transfers her hands up to grab onto his face. She snorts on a new roll of snot as she says, “Thanks, Grey! I love it when you objectify me!”

“I meant your fever,” he says in his signature deadpan, in his signature stick-in-the-mudness. “But yeah, I get what that sounded like.”

She tightens her hold on him. She kind of tries to pull him into the chair with her — which is logistically impossible. She tells him, “This is so nice. This makes me feel better.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He asks her if she’s good on the hug — before he starts to gently extricate himself from her — his heart is hammering and his brain is telling him that this is fucking crazy. 

She is doped up on Benadryl and the one hug every three months that she gets from him, so her feelings are not hurt by his retreat. She just smiles at him before she makes a grab for her tea, which has gone cold. 

She says, “Oh, it’s cold now.”

This results in him pulling it out of her hands after her first sip. He walks it over to the microwave to nuke it back to hot again.

When he gives it back to her, he’s holding it with a potholder and offering the handle to her. He warns her, “Remember, it’s hot. Don’t burn yourself.” 

“Okay, I’m not an idiot child so don’t talk to me like I am one,” she says, making a grab for the cup. She tries to grab the entire cup with her whole hand.

He pulls it away in exasperation. “Missandei, what did I just say?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They are sitting on his couch because she expressed that she has gotten cold. She has a fresh cup of tea in her hand — lukewarm enough to handle how she likes to handle it. She is buried in a self-made cave of his comforter. He pulled the entire thing off his bed and gave it to her because he doesn’t have comfy amenities like throw blankets, because he doesn’t have non-related guests over ever.  

They are talking about something really safe and easy. They are dissecting dinner just for something to do and something to talk about. Missy tells him that she thinks Tal was pretty thirsty, and it’s like, not a good look. She tells Grey that she knows it’s like the pot calling the kettle black, but she is trying to fold in more of a tolerance of hypocrisy into her life. 

She giggles and blows her nose as she says this — and it doesn’t quite make complete sense to him, but he doesn’t ask her to clarify.

Instead, he tells her that he thinks picking a steakhouse for their free dinner was pretty cliched and obvious and boring. He tells her he asked the guys — multiple times — if they were sure. And those idiots said they were sure.

“There are a lot of restaurants in this city,” she says casually to him.

“There are  _ a lot _ of restaurants,” he repeats emphatically. “But yeah, pick a steakhouse. Sure, why not?”

In the course of being able to talk to him like this again — her insides just throb and her heart just hurts. Because she loves this about him — she loves him in this context very much. She likes how he is when he is relaxed and not worried about death in the next moment. She likes how he is when he doesn’t constantly have to calculate his odds.

She feels this renewed belief. She knows she can keep waiting for him. She knows it doesn’t fucking matter what anyone else thinks about it because no one else is living her life. She knows that she’s had a reputation of being soft and weak and under-experienced for the bulk of her life and career. It doesn’t matter that much to her, to keep meeting people’s low expectations of her. 

On his end, as they are talking — his insides are also throbbing. His heart also just hurts. He thinks that she looks really fucking adorable in his blanket. He thinks that she is acting really fucking adorable, all sick and soft and unguarded like this. He thinks her soft smiles and her somewhat lengthy stares at him are really cute. He does not even know what the fuck he is letting happen right now. It just doesn’t feel right to randomly kick this sick woman out of his home just because he’s a fucking idiot.

“How’s your tummy?” she asks. He has noted that in this state — this drowsy and vulnerable state — the way she talks to him has changed a little bit. It’s softer and she sounds younger.  

He sighs. “Um, I just finished a course of antibiotics.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” he says, leaning back against his couch. “Um, it turns out . . . I had an ulcer.”

_ “What!” _

“Hey, it’s all good,” he says, in response to her overreaction. “It’s not a huge thing. My stomach was just producing a lot of acid and there was bad bacteria in there, so just had to zap it.”

“Did you get an ulcer because you’re really stressed?” she asks, scooting a little closer to him.

“Oh, that’s kind of a misconception about ulcers,” he says. “Stress alone doesn’t like, induce ulcers. But stress can exacerbate them.” He shrugs. “I just got a bad bug from somewhere. And then my diet didn’t help — but at the same time, it was kind of a Catch-22 because I couldn’t eat very many things ‘cause they just made me feel sick.” 

He catches the way she is looking at him — with so much investment and concern. In a way, it reminds him of the way his family likes to overreact to his shit. In another way, it makes him feel uncomfortable — like he is failing to meet these baseline expectations — like he is constantly failing. Sympathy makes him feel sad.  

He says, “It’s not a big deal. I feel better now.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


At around one in the morning, she is pretty bad at suppressing her yawns. She also skirts the edge of dozing off in the middle of talking to him. She softly twists in place and occasionally drops her cheek to the back of his couch, sleepily resting her head there as she softly breathes for a quiet moment.

He can’t fucking tell her to go the fuck home in this state. She is going to crash her car and die and just fucking break his heart all over again by dying. 

So he gets up and tells her, “You can stay over if you want. You don’t look in a good state to drive, man. You can go home tomorrow, if you want. Up to you.”  

“Okay,” she says, with her eyes basically closed, rustling his comforter, shifting around and bundling it tighter around her body. She stands up in place with her eyes shut. “I should text my dad then. I don’t want to brush my teeth. I’ll just go lie down now.”

He says, “Wait, Missandei,” as she shuffles her way to his bedroom, as he is gathering up her tea cup and her mess of tissues on the coffee table. “Wrong bed. Sleep in the guest bedroom.”

“Too late,” she calls back to him from inside his room.  _ “You _ sleep in the guest bedroom.”

After depositing the cup in the sink and the tissues in the bin, he finds her curled up in the center of his bed, an asymmetrical blob with her feet sticking out from under the blanket. She is hugging one of his pillows tightly in her arms. Her face is half-buried in it. And she completely looks like she is sleeping already.

“Hey, is that comfortable?” he asks, referring to all of the lumps she has created.

She responds back with, “Oh man, everything smells like you, and it’s the most amazing thing _ ever. _ And I can’t even  _ smell _ that good, Grey. I can’t even imagine how good this would be if I wasn’t sick. Are you going to sleep now, too? Do you wanna sleep here with me?”

He shakes his head even though she can’t see it.

And then simultaneously, they both say,  _ “No, Missandei.” _

He halts in surprise.

And she laughs, stifling the sound of it into the pillow. Her eyes are shut closed as she dreamily says, “I  _ know you, _ Grey. I know you who you are as a person. I know your _ inner soul _ and stuff.” And then, still laughing, she says, “You don’t have to respond to that. You can just go into the other room now. You can go ahead and stay up for another hour thinking about me as I get the best sleep of my life right here.”

  
  
  
  
  



	66. Missy watches Grey's video chat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this ep, Missy hangs out with the love of her life in the morning. It's the best! She finds his guns, finds her hair ties, he gets her a charger, he makes them breakfast, and he has an entire chat with his mom in front of her! This stuff will only fortify Missandei's obsession with this man! Also in this episode, Grey stops himself from having little mini panic attacks. Stretches himself emotionally by not kicking Missandei out of his apartment right away.

  
  
  
  
  


Her fever is still raring whenever she intermittently wakes up throughout the night. She wakes up sweaty and hot. She throws the blanket off of her body before she whimpers and her body starts shaking from being so cold, so she blindly reaches for the damp comforter again.

She gets a short five hours of sleep because she’s uncomfortably sick. She wakes up for the final time when the morning is very quiet, very gentle, and still a little dark. She rolls over —

And totally spots a gun looking right at her on his nightstand. She scrunches her face up and thinks it’s a little bit of a sloppy place to keep a gun, but he’s probably been struggling with getting restful sleep for so many shitty reasons — so it is actually kind of sad. 

She checks her phone — on its last leg of life now — and sees that her dad texted her back just moments ago. He must have been sleeping when her late night message came through. He is just confirming that he got her text and is telling her that he appreciates her telling him what is up. He tells her to drink a lot of liquids — not alcohol, but real liquids.

The thought of alcohol makes her gag. And she rolls her eyes — because her dad really thinks she’s way cooler than she actually is. Parents have their blind spots. 

She texts back and tells him she’s hydrated. She’s had a lot of tea. 

Her dad’s awake right now, so he responds back right away and asks her how she’s feeling.

She tells him she’s still sick.

He asks her where she is at.

She writes:  _ Grey’s _

And he writes back:  _ Okay. Tell him I said hello. _

And that makes her smile — pretty unabashedly — to herself. 

And because she had so much tea the night before, she needs to pee  _ pretty badly. _

  
  
  
  
  
  


She tries to check in on Grey, but he shut the door to the guest bedroom and she’s too shy about disturbing him.

In his bathroom she sheds off his blanket in a mound at her feet before she pulls down her pants and underwear and plops down on the toilet. She is cold, so she decides it’s okay to be a little gross and she picks up the comforter after flushing the toilet, before washing her hands.

Then, re-wrapped in his fluffy comforter, she doubles down on her grossness and brushes her teeth with his toothbrush because she rummaged around in a few drawers and found that he has no spares so that’s on him — she continues to snoop around and looks in his medicine cabinet. At first glance, there is utterly nothing interesting in there at all. She sees athletic tape, antibiotic ointment, over-the-counter painkillers, iodine, and bandaids.

She  _ does _ find a pile of hair ties, though, in an undisturbed corner of the cabinet. 

And for a split second, she feels completely nauseated — because she thinks about what they might signify. She thinks about who has been visiting him and dropping hair ties.

But then she realizes that they are _ hers _ — she recognizes the weight and the color. She picks them up and examines them to make sure. She tries to think about what it means that he kept her hair ties. She thinks that it’s probably preparedness, for when his friends need hair ties in the course of visiting him here. 

She kind of also dares to think it could be sentimental. Maybe it’s a memento of her.

Missandei then pokes around underneath his sink, trying to look for tampons or pads — trying to measure the extent of his hospitality. If there are tampons, then the hair ties are probably there for no special reason.

She does not find tampons.

After she shuts all his cabinets and doors again, she looks at herself in the mirror. Her hair is a right mess. The skin on her nose has started flaking because she has been blowing her nose so much. She does not have any boogers hanging out, thank goodness, because then she’d have to wonder if she talked with him for hours with a booger hanging out of her nose. 

She sees that her skin has this appealing dewiness to it because she’s been sweating. She also sees that her skin also has this unappealing blotching and is kind of discolored because of the lack of rest. 

She borrows his lotion — a no-frills drugstore brand. She pumps a dollop into her hand before warming it in her palm and freshening up her nose with it. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


It is brighter out and she can see things pretty well in the living room. She’s trying to find a charger for her phone — at the desk where he dropped his computer bag. She shamelessly starts to rifle through his stuff, opening drawers and looking through pockets, trying to find a charger. 

She is still completely wearing his comforter, making it a little hard for herself to maneuver.

She finds  _ another gun _ in an unlocked desk drawer — and it makes her wonder if  _ she’s  _ the idiot for keeping her  _ one  _ gun in a safe with a lock. She wonders just  _ how many _ guns Grey has hidden and tucked away in his apartment.

She’s holding onto it and looking at it in the light with her back to the guest bedroom door when — seemingly out of nowhere — she hears him suddenly say, “Hey, what are you doing?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


As she scrambles to put his gun back into its drawer and tells him she’s trying to find a charging cable for her phone, he takes the information in stride, says, “Oh, well, that’s a gun and not a charger,” before he turns around and briefly disappears back into the guest bedroom.

A moment later, he comes back with a charger and cable and walks it over to his kitchen island, which has an outlet. He gestures for her to walk herself and her phone on over.

He reaches out his hand for her to place her phone into it, which she does. And then he absently plugs her phone in — it blips to life — and places it face up on the counter, right in front of her. 

As he starts opening cabinet doors, he sleepily says, “Do you want coffee or tea? Do you want breakfast already? I’m not sure what appetizing thing I have, besides leftover steak.” 

He is wearing a white t-shirt and gray sweatpants. He is slow-moving and sluggish because he woke up due to her puttering. He actually could use a few more hours because he is not at all an early riser on weekends. 

The entire effect of his sleep deprivation is the  _ fucking cutest shit _ she has ever seen. 

One of the most prominent memories in her mind these days was how traumatic it was for her to learn that she had to leave him behind in Valyria. She remembers them standing next to Quaithe’s couch, him still bleeding from out of his stomach. She had been too afraid to say the entire truth to him at that moment. She had been slow and didn’t realize that it was  _ really  _ intended to be the end. She had been in a certain kind of denial in the moment. She blamed it on the newness of the realization.

That is why now — with nothing huge and impending happening — she earnestly and passionately says to him, “I love you, Grey. Thank you for letting me stay the night.” 

His back is to her — he’s reaching for another set of mugs. She sees him freeze — she actually sees him pausing to think.

Then he sighs with weariness. After sighing, he pauses. And then finally, he responds with, “Seriously, aren’t you dating someone? Is it okay with him for you to talk to me like this?”

“Uhhh,” she says slowly. “Uh, I’m totally not dating anyone. Wherever did you get that idea?”

And then the tablet thing on his kitchen counter bounces right to life. It starts to ring.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He waves at her spastically — suddenly on high alert and wide awake now — he is waving at her to keep her fucking mouth shut and to make no sounds. She is confused for a split second, until he urgently says, “It’s my mom. I don’t want her to see you here. If I don’t pick up, she’ll call me twenty more times. Please keep quiet as I talk to her, okay?”

“What?” Missy says, hugging his comforter around herself tighter — protectively. “I’ve met your mom though — did she  _ not like me?  _ How come she can’t know I’m here? Are you embarrassed of me or something?”

“Don’t worry about it!” Grey snaps, gesticulating wildly to her again. “Just keep quiet, okay! And for the record, I’m really sorry for talking to you in this way! I’m just nervous.”

He then accepts the call — he connects the line. He says, “What’s up, Mom? You’re calling me really early. Is everything okay?”

From behind the screen, Missandei can hear Grey’s mom go, “Baby! How come you are up so early!”

Missandei sees Grey scrunch up his face all adorable and cute and already pissed off as he looks down at his mom. “Ma! You  _ called me,  _ remember?”  

“I didn’t think you’d pick up. I thought you’d still be sleeping.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Seconds into witnessing him carry on a conversation with his mom, Missandei realizes in surprise that she has never really witnessed this side of him — she’s never really seen him as a son and as someone’s child before. The one other time she was around him and his parents was three years ago. She was in their house in the Summer Isles. Grey was compulsively presenting. His parents were really concerned and ticked off and had a million questions about their son’s safety. She didn’t talk with them very much. They were mostly focused on Sam, the doctor there to evaluate their son’s mental faculties and emotional capacity to carry on his high-pressured job. 

Missandei remembers coming back later, with Margaery. His parents had been angrier during that visit, because they suspected that Grey completely failed Sam’s evaluation and correctly guessed that their son’s job was doing whatever it could to steal their son back.

So Missandei might kind of understand why he’s trying to hide her from his parents. There would be a lot of explain. It is also very early, and she’s wearing his bed.

Okay, it makes total sense.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She has never seen the output of months and months worth of effort on his part — in reconnecting with his family. 

So she avidly takes in the sight. She watches him as he nervously glances back at her sometimes, obviously uncomfortable that she is watching him talk to his mom. She smiles at him every time, because she knows that he really has nothing to worry about at all. 

She eavesdrops even though his eyes sometimes drill into her, signalling to her that he’d love some fucking privacy. She is not giving him privacy. She just listens attentively as his mom totally checks in on his poop situation. His mom wants to know  _ everything —  _ the frequency of his poops, the texture of his poops, the ease in which he poops, the color of his poops, whether they are floating or sinking. 

And he is fucking adorable and sweating nervously, as he tries to get his mom to stop talking about his poops with him — rather fruitlessly. He probably is concerned that it is off-putting and gross to her — both the topic of conversation and also how close he is with his mom.

But actually, listening to him talk to his mom like this gives her  _ so much hope. _ She is listening to him be truthful and open. She is listening to him work to communicate. She is also getting all of this background and history.

She learns that he can eat regular food again, for instance, because his mom wants to know how palatable her food is to him. She is asking him if eating wet things is still hard for him. His mom asks him if he’s been able to keep it down — if the nausea has subsided more.  

From this, Missandei finally realizes — with a lot of concern and empathy and shame — that he must’ve had  _ a really hard time _ eating, probably since coming back from Valyria. And she completely didn’t notice. She completely was self-focused and locked in on what his return meant  _ for her _ and  _ for them. _

“What did you eat for dinner yesterday?” his mom asks him.

“Beef,” he answers succinctly. “And mushy vegetables. Mashed potatoes.”

“Baby!” his mom coos. “You ate soft potatoes! Good job, baby! I’m proud of you!”

Again, Grey glances nervously at Missandei. And then self-consciously, back at his mom, he lowers his voice before says, “Mom, this isn’t really a big deal. It’s cool. You don’t have to be so excessive.”

His mom’s voice suddenly hardens. “Okay, don’t  _ tell me _ what I have to be, _ Nudho.” _

This makes Missandei silently start cracking up behind the screen — and it makes her this point of distraction to Grey.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He feels really fucking dumb and stupid after he finally gets his mom to hang up. She can sense that he’s trying to rush her off the video chat, so she straight up asks him directly about it. She asks, “How come you are trying to get me off the phone? Do you have somewhere to be?” She refers to every electronic form of communication as 'the phone' because she is old.

“No,” he says. “I just wanna get a move on, with my day.”

“You are actually really weird,” she tells him. And then she amends that with, “Weirder than normal, I mean.” 

“Okay, bye, Ma.”

“Sure, baby,” she says. “Have a nice Sunday. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He feels fucking dumb after he gets off the video call and it’s just the two of them again because he didn’t think he’d have to give his mom a  _ poop update  _ right  _ in front of _ Missandei. So that’s just fucking great.

He’s about to crack a self-deprecating joke to her to alleviate the awkwardness he feels — maybe something about how he knows he’s repulsively close to his mother and sometimes she kisses him right on his mouth so yes,  _ yes,  _ he’s quite a catch.

He’s about to jokingly tell Missandei that it’s okay to run for the hills now. 

But she beats him to the punch. She cuts off whatever he’s going to say with, “I’m not dating anyone, for the record. I wouldn’t start dating someone without talking to you about it and letting you know. For the record, I’m still kind of holding this torch for you.” 

She smiles at that — softly and mildly and also kind of proud of herself for her transparency and brave vulnerability.

He’s frowning — deeply.

“Grey — you and your mom sound really  _ nice  _ together,” she asserts. “You sound  _ really close _ with each other —”

“That’s not disgusting?” he blurts.

She blinks, fluttering her lashes in surprise a few times. 

And she answers his question in this unexpected way. Thoughtfully, she says, “It’s not disgusting. It’s actually . . . kind of sad for me. It kind of makes me wish I could still talk to my mom like that — it kind of makes me miss my mom a little bit harder.”

He sharply inhales — returning back to the stove to turn it on. On the sigh, he says, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she says simply.

He doesn’t know what else to do, after he puts the kettle on the heat. So he slowly turns back around to face her.

“You’re really trying hard, aren’t you?” she asks him, with this happiness radiating from her. “You’re really working really hard to get to a good place, aren’t you?”

He says nothing in response to that — because he doesn’t know  _ what _ to say to that. He just feels inexplicably awful and anxious inside.

“I’m impressed with you,” she says, lowering her voice a little bit. “I’m proud of you, too,” she adds.  

  
  
  
  
  
  


After tea and sharing some toast — an avocado toast that she relentlessly makes fun of him for because he’s such a white woman on her way to spin class — he feels like he wants to get more sleep. Because he really  _ did  _ spend unnecessary hours thinking about her after she was already asleep. He  _ did  _ toss and turn thinking about how mad he is at himself for cutting Sam out of his life and for constantly trying to cut Missandei out of his life. He  _ did _ think about how bitter he is that he is getting what he deserves and is blatantly asking for — as he was simultaneously and really unfairly pissed at her for leaving him behind again. 

He spent a lot of the night trying to work out his anger, trying to understand why he keeps feeling abandoned when all he actually ever does is give people really limited options that are all pretty bad options.

He’s really exhausted.

And he doesn’t think it’s a good idea to give her the wrong idea by spending the day with her in addition to spending an entire night with her. Plus, she is sick and should rest herself instead of being so focused on him and his bullshit all the time.

This is why he nicely asks her to leave. He actually asks her that, if it’s okay with her, he’d really like some alone time for a bit. He asks her if she’s okay enough to make the drive home.

She smiles at him and nods. She actually raises her hand to cup his cheek for a moment.

She has to give back his comforter. Even though this thing is like, the new love of her life, it’s unwieldy for her to continue to borrow it, to drag it into her car — and he’d also be devoid of a blanket. 

She compromises with him — by stealing a sweatshirt from his closet. It’s his university sweatshirt. She pulls it over her head and shoves her arms through the armholes. She promises him, “I’ll bring this back to you. I’ll take good care of it.”

And then standing at his door, before she leaves, with her car keys in her hand — she brushes her hand across his collarbone. She knows she is taking so many liberties with him — but so far, he is putting up with it. 

She says to him, “You were jealous,” as a statement of fact. He really can’t argue with it. “You were jealous and angry with me because you thought I was dating someone,” she says, kind of in awe. And then, looking up at him, she says, “You shouldn’t listen to Yara and Daario anymore. They are like . . . kind of stupid at relationships.”

He rolls his eyes — at himself. Because he knows that Yara and Daario are dumb. And he is fucking dumb by extension. He’s dumb for listening to their dumb asses and for not understanding that their dumb jokes are dumb.

So he decides to give her a hug without her having to ask for one. It’s one of those impulsive, weighty decisions in him that completely tracks as normal in other people.

He pulls her in close — she looks momentarily shocked before this bigass smile transforms her entire face — and he can’t look at how fucking happy she gets when he gives her this smallass shit because it makes him feel like an asshole, so he squishes her hot head in the crook of his arm. He lets himself smell the side of her head — she smells warm and cotton-y — she’s still running a high fever so there’s just heat emanating off her bare skin. And, to be honest, he just feels so fucking tired and also so fucking relieved as he holds onto her. It’s kind of a problem, how relieved he feels.

“Just . . . let me be there for you, sometimes,” she says to him, brushing her lips over his cheek, near his ear.  _ “Please.” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


After Grey sends the meeting invite, he has to wait like, two hours before Sam responds. Grey has to tell himself not to be a pessimistic, dramatic little bitch who constantly catastrophizes in his head because he’s shit at emotions. Grey has to constantly remind himself that Sam is just busy. Sam has other patient-clients besides Grey. Sam probably has close relationships with all of them. Sam probably makes all of them feel heard and feel like their emotions and their sense of personhood is important and really matters. Sam probably does not miss listening to Grey and Grey’s fucking stupid non-problems all day — barring the penis thing and the imprisonment thing.

Sam responds close to 11 a.m. by accepting the meeting invite. The meeting is for later in the day — for 6 p.m. — right after Sam’s very last meeting. Grey didn’t want to wait.

So the first thing Grey says to Sam at 6 o’clock when he sees Sam again in Sam’s office is, “Hey, I’m really, really sorry — for the things I said — for the way I said them — for getting so mad at you when you were only trying to help me — and for being petty and cutting you out of my life.” 

Grey sighs raggedly.

And then he says, “You were right about me — about a lot of things. I’d like to continue seeing you. If that’s okay?”

  
  
  
  
  
  



	67. Grey testifies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this ep, Grey goes to court and gets treated like he's the one on trial. The future love of his life tells him it's all white people's fault. Then he makes up with his therapist and then generally continues pushing himself toward being healthy and happy. It's a grind, man. It's a grind! Also in this ep, Missandei wonders about her parents' sex life as she watches more Insecure with her dad.

  
  
  
  


Because of his schedule, Grey has to wear a suit and tie to the office and deal with a bunch of catcalls from his colleagues and one really uncomfortable and awkward ass-squeeze from Daario — who  _ immediately  _ looks like he really regrets grabbing Grey’s ass right after he did it. 

Grey has to sit through their weekly status update in his tailored threads — the one that he breaks out for only over specific occasions because, honestly, he just doesn’t like to go to the dry cleaners that much. It’s another thing on his plate, so he tries not to suit up unless he absolutely has to.

He wears his suit because he doesn’t have time to go home and change before he has to testify at a pre-trial hearing. It’s a testimony in front of the judiciary committee and one of many testimonies he will need to give over the next year — maybe even longer. 

He’s not super tapped into the details because they would only make him mad if he knew how deep it got — but he _ does _ know that Selmy had to push really hard and take it up to Jon Snow — to allow the transcript of Grey’s testimony to be reported out. 

She sneaks her hand up his arm to rub his shoulder briefly, when they are alone in a small conference room after a quick meeting. She does it after he pushes himself and confesses to her and tells her that he’s honestly really nervous about this — which is weird because he fucking gives testimonies all the fucking time. He forces himself to identify what he is feeling before he tells her he’s nervous that the cost of the raid or some other kind of technicality he overlooked will ruin what they have all worked so hard for — for years and years. He’s nervous that he allows people to withhold justice, through the cracks that he allows to manifest because he messed up a little bit.

“Okay, fuck them all,” Missandei tells him, frowning at the same time she is trying to get him to look her in the face. “My God, you poor thing. You’ve been gaslighted so hard by all of these  _ white people,  _ that you think you forgetting to submit a form or budgeting an extra car is the same as a  _ sack of shit _ running an all-out international human trafficking operation out in the open for over a  _ decade.  _ Grey, you did your best.”

“But —”

“Don’t say your best is not good enough,” she interrupts in a clip. “It’s more than good enough. It’s  _ better _ than they deserve. If it’s not enough, it’s because this system is  _ broken.”  _

  
  
  
  
  
  


It’s a closed hearing — and it’s occurring later than ideal and expected because of the months and months of finagling with Baelish’s team of lawyers. It’s also occurring later than expected because they allowed the delay on their end — they kept holding out hope that Lysa Arryn loves her son more than she loves this man. 

But Grey supposes that love is probably the wrong word in this context. He supposes that it’s not love as much as it is devotion built from years of abuse, manipulation, and oppression. 

He is asked —  _ again —  _ many questions around the perceived excessive use of force during the raid on Baelish’s home. 

He dislikes that he has to even answer this question. Leadership in the organization has told him repeatedly to not worry about it and to just answer truthfully. They have told him that they stand behind his decisions. 

He does not believe those fuckers whatsoever. He has been stressed out because he’s concerned about being left out to hang dry, by them — _ again — _ because he is expendable to them.  

But of course he tells his truth to the committee nonetheless. He has to. It’s his job. It’s his word. He has nothing left but the truth.

So during the hearing, he repeats his recollection of events again. He tells them why he scoped it out the way he did. He tells them why he budgeted the way he did. He talks about comparable costs in other operations. He talks about what is the documented procedure. He understands there is always interpretation in protocol, so he talks through his interpretation.

They strangely do not want to hear about the years his team has spent gathering evidence on this man — but Grey supposes that he will have the opportunity to talk about that in future hearings — maybe, maybe.

He has to repeat what he just said when he is asked a clarifying question that tells him that they are digging. He repeats his recollection of events. He tells them why it costs how much it did. He tells him it’s within protocol and it’s their procedure for this based on priorities. He tells them that the need for the number of personnel is based on analyses that an assessment team ran prior to the engagement. 

He does not tell the committee members that the entire book of procedures was changed and skewed more conservative because his former team members died with him leading them — that two people, including himself, were badly injured. He doesn’t tell them this because they probably already know — and they did not directly ask him what he thinks the overarching whys are. He knows they don’t want him to question the premise of their questions.

Giving his testimony takes nearly two hours — because he had to walk them through the run-of-show from moment to moment — multiple times. He feels like they are trying to catch him in a slip up. He feels like they are trying to catch him lying. He wonders if Baelish’s testimonies will feel like this to Baelish also.

He doesn’t bother wondering why he is so untrustworthy. Selmy has told him not to frame it in his head like that. Selmy has told him that everyone hates talking to the committee and that committee hearings always roll out like this. Selmy told him it’s all bullshit, but made it clear that the way Grey is treated is not out of the ordinary.

When he repeated that to her — because he’s been trying  _ really hard  _ to let her into his life more — she had told him that Selmy does not know what the fuck he is talking about because Selmy is an old white dude. No offense to Selmy.

It’s cold outside — but dry and sunny — once he is released.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He and Sam decide that something in their relationship and dynamic needs to change — they  _ know this.  _ They just don’t know what to change it to.

They spend an entire session in Sam’s office trying to dissect it, with Sam offering these nuggets from his life that kind of makes Grey’s brain light up. 

Like, Sam casually admits to Grey that he’s been losing sleep over this — over their fight and their estrangement. 

“You haven’t been sleeping well?” Grey asks, trying to be careful because he’s currently simplistically afraid of starting another fight with Sam. “Me too. But you know that. You know sleeping is also a thing with me. Do you usually sleep fine?”

Sam responds with a weak smile — because this nicely dove-tailed into a problem that they have. It’s been something Sam had been debating internally for a long while — but especially in the days leading up to this session. It’s been something he’s talked to Margaery about, because he thought she might have insight on this, as a professional. It’s definitely been something that Gilly and he have talked about, and surprisingly, Gilly has softened her stance a little bit over the past few days. She admitted that maybe she let her personal feelings cloud her professional judgement because all she saw was her husband putting in a full day at work, only to come home and continue putting in hours researching and reading — which is time spent away from their child and her. 

Sam didn’t realize she felt that way. He quietly told her he thought it was okay, because he tried to do it all after they were both asleep. He tried not to let his job take time away from the family. He just didn’t realize he wasn’t doing a good enough job at it.

When Sam brought up self-disclosure as a therapeutic technique to Margaery, she told him it’s a fairly advanced technique and advocated for boundary-setting and for Sam not to breach that line.

He very much respects Margaery professionally. She is more senior and experienced than he is — because he started his education later, because it took him a long time to settle and find a sense of purpose in life. She is more senior than he is, so he also heard her loud and clear — it’s an advanced technique. She doesn’t think he should do it. 

He’s been reticent because he’s scared he will get something out of this, that he will meet his own needs through this instead of serving Grey’s needs. He’s been reticent because he has not undergone training for this, and there is so much research still to digest. He’s been feeling anxiety because he does not think it serves Grey for Sam to go off and do training while Grey is just waiting.

“Sam?” Grey prompts.

“Sorry,” Sam says, clearing his throat. And rather than answering the sleep question, Sam says, “I’ve been thinking a lot the past few months — maybe the past few years — the entire time I’ve known you, pretty much — that I wish you had better options for therapy.”

Grey constricts his face a little bit — uncertain of where this is going. But it honestly sounds like he’s about to get broken up with because he’s been bad. So he starts internally bracing himself.

“We do a lot of evaluation here,” Sam says. “You know, assessing officers’ abilities to carry on their very stressful jobs —”

“Yeah,” Grey says. “Because the organization wants to cover their ass for the next time an officer loses it and sets their house on fire with their children inside. I know.” 

Sam decides to bypass that articulation — because he doesn’t want to get off-topic. He says, “Our strength here really isn’t clinical work.” 

“I know that, too,” Grey says.

“I’m . . . not the most trained to do trauma-focused CBT,” Sam says reluctantly. 

“I also know that,” Grey says. And then upon Sam’s quiet attention on that, Grey blithely explains, “Sam, I am a psycho who learns everything about a person so that I can use them as a tool. Of course I looked you up when I first started seeing you.”

So Sam completely does  _ not _ bypass  _ that _ articulation. He says, “Grey, you’re not a psycho. You don’t actually have many of the traits of psychopathy. We established this in what was probably our third session together.”

“I _ know,” _ Grey says, smiling a little bit now. “I don’t actually think I’m a psycho because I’m way too empathetic. I just said that to get you riled up and nerdily uppity.”

“Grey,” Sam says patiently — getting over his own slip up — trying to move forward again. “Don’t you sometimes want a therapist who is better trained and who has the cultural background you do?”

“And who has security clearance so I don’t have to use code words for ‘I kill and manipulate people for a living, and it makes me really sad inside’?” Grey says right away. “Yeah, that would be amazing. Please point me to this unicorn.” 

And then Grey sighs — he drops the bravado. 

Grey says, “Sam, you’re all I’ve got. You’re my best option.”

Sam nods, kind of rolling his eyes at himself. “Now it’s my turn to say  _ I know.” _

“You’ve been doing a good job,” Grey says, kind of reluctantly — because he understands and can read people really well. He now knows this is what Sam is concerned with. “You’ve helped me a lot so far.”

“Okay, see, this is what I don’t want,” Sam says back. “I don’t want you to have to validate me and my work. That’s when I know I’m doing a disservice to you.”

Grey is shrugging. He’s less concerned with this. 

Grey leans back on the couch — because he finally understands he’s not about to be broken up with. He understands that Sam actually feels too emotionally invested in him, and that is making Sam go a little nuts.

This is actually something Grey can  _ vastly _ relate to.  

“Sam, you should be more confident in yourself and your abilities,” Grey says — really directly and baldly. “I think you are a lot better at your job than you think you are. I think maybe you’ve been approaching me with kid gloves because you’ve been nervous about fucking up with me. But have more confidence in yourself, man. Let’s jumpstart my healing into hyperdrive, man. I know that I responded really badly when you told me off — but you know what? That was actually super helpful in the end. You should tell me off more often. I promise I won’t always freak out and cut you out of my life.”

Sam’s heart is kind of just pounding and his face is hot — he knows he’s flushing right now. He says, “Grey, I don’t know why your colleagues don’t think you’re funny. You’re actually really funny.”

“I  _ know.” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


He doesn’t chat very much with his brother — way less than he chats with their mom — but he’s been trying to be better about it. 

Because they don’t talk too much together, their conversation is stagnant, like standing water. They are completely unpracticed at showing any vulnerability to each other, so they have to relate by going down a list of stuff they’ve been doing. By design and because it’s the law, Grey tells Azzie that Grey’s job has been stressful and has been kind of weighing on his mind. This makes Azzie snort, kind of in derision, because Azzie thinks his little brother’s job is the fucking worst job — so of course it’s stressful. It’s very stressful being dehumanized on a daily basis.

That topic of conversation is awkward, so they — seriously — go back to an old standby. They talk about Grey’s poops. 

And then Azzie talks about his students and his classes. He’s a fitness coach at a gym. He is saving up and building out his client base before opening up his own gym. This is something that their parents like and hate. They like that he’s a teacher. They hate that he doesn’t teach books. 

Azzie, being the older brother, tells Grey about how he thinks Grey should be working out — now that Grey is eating again, now that Grey actually has the ability to put on substantial weight again. 

Grey doesn’t really like being told what to do — by anyone — so he just puts up with the lecturing and responds with silence. Azzie gets the point. 

Grey asks about Mella, Azzie’s longtime girlfriend and the reason Azzie never left the Isles. Azzie had never wanted to leave her.

So it’s a completely surprise to hear his brother say, “We broke up.”

“Whoa, what? How come?”

Through the screen of the home hub that their mother bought them — and she only bought one for Azzie so that she didn’t look unequal in her giving — Azzie shrugs. He says, “We just wanted different things.”

“Like what?”

“God, you’re so nosey,  _ Mom.” _

“Okay, that’s really hurtful. I’m not like Mom at all.”

Grey sees his brother shrug on the screen. He hears his brother say, “We broke up because she cheated on me. With her coworker.”

This makes Grey jolt into attentiveness. 

Then he says, “What the fuck? What an asshole. What a fucking  _ asshole. _ You were living together, too! You were really integrated into her family, too! What the fuck!”

“Thanks, man,” Azzie says. “I appreciate this strong response in defense of me. I’m pretty sad about it, to be honest.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He straight up tells her that if they are going to hang out a little bit more outside of work, she needs to stop looking at him the way that she does and she needs to stop telling him that she loves him all the time. These are hard limits for him. The way she looks at him makes him feel bad. The way she tells him she loves him makes him feel bad. He would rather just pretend these things about her don’t exist.  

In response to this, she crosses her arms. She even cocks a hip. She says, “Hey, you sound ridiculous right now. Why must I avoid triggering you? Why don’t you just learn how to accept compliments without going into a self-hating hole?”

This makes him smile at her —  _ so much _ and against the wishes of his brain. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


When Grey asks her if she’s free on Friday night to hang out — there’s a moment where she wants to scream YES ALL DAY YES at him. But she actually says, “Oh my fucking God, I  _ can’t _ .  _ Dammit!”  _ She even stomps her foot on the ground. 

Grey actually looks relieved that she can’t hang out with him, so fuck that guy — he’s so fucking cute.

She tells herself that her dad  _ better _ make this sacrifice fucking worth it — as she arrives home and starts decompressing. 

The house sizzles and smells of garlic. She squeals because she thinks that he is making what she thinks he is making. She runs up the stairs to take off her makeup and her khaki-colored outfit. She takes her hair down and fluffs it out. 

She’s bare-faced and her glasses are on, as she leans over her Dad’s shoulder to peep at what he’s making in the kitchen.

She says, “Oh my gosh. No way!”

“I just want to show you up,” he murmurs, laughing a little bit. “Show you how to actually cook this food.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


After dinner, she and her pops watch more simulated sex together, sitting side by side on the couch. They watch really tasteful nudity together. They watch people who are in love and in pain kind of act out that pain through really passionate sexin’. She thinks that if her mom was alive right in this moment and just stepped into the room without any context — her mom wouldn’t believe it. Her mom wouldn’t believe that her husband has loosened up so much and is watching a non-documentary. Her mom wouldn’t believe that Missandei isn’t holding her hands over her face — because that’s what they used to have her do when she was a child and a movie was PG-13. They made her cover her face during the parts they thought were inappropriate.

Missy actually says, “Wow,” out loud, at the TV screen. 

And that is all she says, in response to the sex scene.

Her dad continues inscrutably saying nothing direct about the sex.  

Sometimes she wonders how her parents used to have sex with each other — when they were young and when they were older. She finds that as time goes on, she wonders more and more — who her mother was a person outside of motherhood. Her mother was probably a woman who was passionate in bed. She hopes her mother wasn’t a person who was too self-sacrificing in bed, just like how her mother was in the rest of life. She hopes that her mother had many orgasms over the course of her life.

She looks over at her dad — the man who has the answer to these questions. He is stoic and unmoving right now. He refuses to make eye contact with her.

She knows she can’t freaking ask her dad the answers to her questions — yet.

  
  
  
  
  
  


On Saturday evening, she shows up at his door — ten minutes early — with her face nicely done up — natural-looking and glowing — instead of how she looks when she is working nights. 

She looks pretty. He holds onto his door jamb for a moment. He tells himself to fucking relax, Jesus Christ, as he takes a bottle of . . . liquor from her. 

He says, “Damn,” as he does it. It’s a lot of bourbon.

“Um, obviously I’m not intending to drink the entire bottle in one night,” she says quickly, following him into his kitchen. “It’s just — it’s weird to show up to a person’s home empty handed! And I’m like, are we sick of wine? Should we mix it up? And then I was like, oh mix — cocktails! Maybe we can have  _ one _ cocktail before heading out. Maybe it will help us relax. I’m not anxious about this at all! Are  _ you?” _

He is pulling down glasses from his cabinet. He has this ghost of a smile on his face — in response to her bit, her babbling bit — and he asks her, “How do you want to drink this?”

She takes off her thick jacket, revealing a pretty basic sweater that she spent two hours picking out. She says, “Um, with a sugar cube and bitters?”

“I don’t have all the stuff to make an old fashioned,” he says, his eyes steady on her.

“Oh, okay.”

He asks, “Can I just make you something random out of the stuff that is in my fridge?” 

“Oh, sure.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	68. Theon is hurt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this ep, Missy's and Grey's hangout gets interrupted by a personal emergency. Theon is not okay. Grey spends his evening at the hospital with the Greyjoys. It's not the funnest time. Then Grey calls up the future love of his life for some support, but sometimes asking for help is a bit of a mixed bag.

  
  
  


 

At first, after he flips over his glowing phone and sees who is calling, he sends Yara straight to voicemail. He refocuses his attention back on Missandei’s patient and smiling face — he finds himself softly smiling back at her. They’ve been doing this a lot all night, these silent and bashful exchanges because they are both aware of how she professes to feel about him. 

He’s about to ask her if she likes her dinner — a rice bowl topped with fish — when his phone vibrates with a text message.

The screen is still face up, so he sees and reads the message preview.  

His hand clamps right down on phone after that. He looks apologetic and she’s still looking at him with gentleness — as he says, “I’m so sorry. I have to get this.”

Her expression changes — she tenses up and straightens in her seat. She waves her hand in his general direction. She says, “Of course, go ahead. Of course.”

Her worried eyes follow him as he stands up from his seat and leaves the table to find a private nook somewhere in the restaurant to call Yara back.

  
  
  
  
  
  


After he gets off the phone again, he rushes back to the table where Missandei is. He doesn’t know how much he can or should tell her, so for now, he reverts to his normal mode of decision making. He decides she doesn’t need to know right now. He says, “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

“Is everything okay?” she asks quickly.

His initial silence is his response to this. Then he clears his throat, pulls out his wallet, and starts digging around for a credit card that he can leave behind with her. 

“Oh, don’t worry about it. I can take care of the bill,” she says, when she realizes what he is doing. She repeats, “Grey, is everything okay?” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


It takes him a while to find Yara in the hospital, and when he gets there, he only finds her, sitting in a holding area. 

Her eyes are dry — her face pale — and her expression is resolute and grim as she looks at him and answers his unasked question. She says, “He’s in surgery right now. It doesn’t look good. That’s all I know.”

So Grey sits down beside her, in a chair with an abstract pattern on it. He folds his hands over in his lap as Yara leans forward and presses her elbows heavily on her knees. Her hands are tinged pink from sloppy handwashing. 

She doesn’t explain to him why her parents are not here or why their friends aren’t here or even why Ruby is inconspicuously absent. She already told him the perfunctory information over text message: Theon shot himself in the chest, and there were feathers and blood everywhere. 

“You know what I said to him?” she asks, voice low. And before waiting for Grey to answer, she says, “I told him that it’d be easier for everyone if he just killed himself — but he wouldn’t have the balls to ever actually do it.”

“When did you say that to him?” Grey asks, wondering if they had a fight recently.

“Maybe a few months after he came home from the hospital.”

“You mean after Bolton?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“That’s a really shitty thing to have said to him,” Grey says. “But that’s not why this happened.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Information comes out in trickles. They get tiny updates from doctors who are very straightforward about the odds of survival. They know that only about fifteen percent of people survive an attempt made by guns in this manner. Grey eerily remembers the gun on Theon’s kitchen counter with stark clarity and remembers assuming — optimistically — that the gun was a safety blanket, there as protection and as a means to gain back some semblance of being okay again.

They learn that the shot missed most major organs. They also learn that Yara found him really quickly — and it’s making a lot of difference. They learn that there is just a lot of internal bleeding.

He learns that Yara does not want her father to be here, but she would like her mom to be here. Yara speculates that her mom would never forgive her if Theon died like this and their mom just wasn’t around in her son’s final moments, and she did not get to say goodbye or act out the old superstitious customs of their people. Yara bitterly tells him that her mom would probably spend the rest of her life blaming herself for Theon’s death because she didn’t get the chance to throw water on Theon’s dying body because that is how logical their mom is sometimes. 

“I can’t get my mom here without my dad getting wise to it, though,” Yara mutters, dropping her face. “And our dad really does not need to fucking  _ be here.” _

“Where’s Ruby?” Grey asks gently.

“They broke up.”

“When?”

“Last week,” she says. “I just didn’t think Theon would get so fuckin' dramatic about it and try to kill himself over it.”

“Call her,” Grey says. “Give her the option of being here. Call your mom, too.”

“I ain’t calling that fucking bitch,” Yara says darkly and ambiguously.

  
  
  
  
  
  


As they wait for Ruby to arrive, he listens to Yara dissect over everything. He listens to Yara speculate that Theon must have wanted to be found and he must’ve been subconsciousness sabotaging because he chose a gun in his home, which she had a key to and was always passing through. He didn’t choose to throw himself off a bridge and drown himself in the ocean, for instance, which seems more fitting for their people. 

Grey listens to Yara decide that there must be a part of Theon that still wants to live. 

He also listens to Yara’s utter confusion — wondering why it has come to this after Theon has already survived and made it through so much already. She tells Grey that she thought Theon had pretty much gotten over the Bolton thing — he was so much better than he had been in the immediate aftermath. He had a lady. He had a nice place to live. He had all of his hobbies. He was sociable. He just seemed like he was doing better and better. 

“And then that bitch ruined him by breaking up with him,” Yara says, right as Ruby walks into the waiting area, with wild eyes searching for them.

  
  
  
  
  
  


They have a tight ten minutes with Ruby before Yara and Theon’s parents arrive — because, Yara says, her mom is a narc. 

In the ten minutes, there is such a loud outpour of emotion. Ruby nearly collapses — and Grey has to catch her. She starts sobbing uncontrollably, as Yara coldly glowers at her and tells her that this is pretty much all of her fault.

“Yara,” Grey says quietly, trying to pull her out of her rage. 

Yara ignores him and just starts taunting Ruby. Yara wants to know why Ruby is making Theon’s suicide all about her. Yara wants to know why Ruby even bothered showing up because this is exactly what she wanted, isn’t it? For Theon to just be forever out of her life. 

This is an ugly side of Yara that he has seen, time and time again. He doesn’t hold it against her because he knows her — he knows who she is.

Grey sees this play out again — but on Balon Greyjoy, when Yara’s parents show up. Their mother’s eyes are red and she’s clutching tissues. Balon is livid and a little hard to read.

He is also a dick.

When he spots Grey, he asks Yara, “Why is he here?”

It makes Grey remember that Balon blames Grey for what happened to Theon.

Yara impatiently doesn’t answer her dad. She just looks straight ahead.

  
  
  
  
  
  


For the next hour, Grey is just fucking miserable. He’s numb and worried about Theon. He’s worried for Yara. He keeps thinking that he needs to stay and put up with Balon Greyjoy’s shittiness until he hears a definitive update about Theon. Either Theon is gone or Theon isn’t. He needs to know this before he leaves this building.

He has to sit and listen to them talk in circles. They all wonder how this even happened. Grey answers them silently — in his head. He tells himself that sometimes the pain is so all encompassing and pervasive that it is all people can see sometimes. The brain is also not always trustworthy and sometimes it tells these lies that are hard to detect as lies. It’s hard to not be able to rely on one’s own mind. 

Theon’s mother wonders out loud, if Theon knows that he is loved because if he did, how could this have happened?

Grey does answer this one out loud. He says, “He knows he’s loved.”

They largely do not listen to him. Their own grief is too loud, he is basically a stranger to them, and what has happened is just incomprehensible to them.

  
  
  
  
  
  


After another two hours — after Balon makes it really awkward and uncomfortable for everyone by trying to get answers  _ from doctors  _ through threats that did not work whatsoever — they finally get some positive information from Theon’s wary surgeon.

Theon’s surgeon says, “It went really well. He’s going to need some time in intensive care before we can schedule him for another surgery to repair —”

“So he’s going to be okay?” Yara cuts in.

  
  
  
  
  
  


After learning that Theon did not die, Balon more or less tosses both Grey and Ruby out of the hospital, citing that it’s better if it’s just  _ family _ now, focused on Theon’s healing. 

His dismissal of them causes Ruby to hang her head — kind of defeated. It makes Grey think that maybe she is deeply familiar with this kiss off.

Neither of them want to fight with a family who is grieving. Grey doesn’t want Balon to yell at him in the middle of a hospital waiting room because it would disturb the other people who are waiting and worried about their loved ones.

So he and Ruby leave without a fuss.

On the sidewalk, he asks her, “Do you have somewhere to go? Someone to talk with?” because while he doesn’t want to be this person for her, he doesn’t want another person to feel like they have to be burdened with their own dark thoughts.

She says, “Yes,” as she looks at him with unshed tears in her eyes. And then, sort of as explanation for all of the shitty things that Theon’s family have been saying to her all night, she says, “I love him — I really  _ tried _ to make it work — but —”

“It’s cool,” Grey interrupts, because he’s not really about listening to someone implore him to understand why she needed to leave for self-preservation. “I don’t judge. You did what you had to do.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


When she gets his text message, she basically carries it out without question. She gets up out of bed and puts on some clothes. Her dad is already asleep so she doesn’t say goodbye to him or explain to him where she is going. She just leaves a note on the fridge.

She goes to a Walmart because that’s the only store open that has the stuff that he wants. She buys sponges, rags, gloves, bleach, an enzyme cleaner, and drywall spackle. 

She thinks it’s a little weird when he tells her to meet him at Theon’s house, but she also implicitly trusts him, so she doesn’t ask him questions over text message. She senses that this is important. So she just follows his directions.

He is already waiting there, at the front door when she shows up with the supplies. He has already picked the lock and the door is unlocked when she arrives — which she isn’t aware of.

His hand is on the doorknob as he tells her, “Hey, Theon tried to kill himself with his gun tonight. He is okay — he’s alive. He survived. But there’s a mess in there, and you’re about to see it, okay?” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


It happened in the bedroom — and it looks about just what Grey expected it. To Missandei, it is surprisingly contained. 

There are small blood-tinged feathers on the carpet.

“He was wearing a coat,” Grey explains, thinking about infection again, thinking about what a fucking pain in the ass it was when he was shot in the stomach and how it was the infection that almost killed him and not the blood loss. “That was dumb,” Grey mutters. “He probably blasted a bunch of dirty feathers into his body because he wasn’t thinking clearly.”

Cleaning up the blood on the wall, the blood in the carpet, and wiping down micro droplets with an enzyme cleaning takes  _ a while. _ The wall is pretty easy. It gets a few wipe-downs. There is no bullet hole in the wall, which Grey sort of anticipated. But it’s nice that there’s no hole to patch. Grey anticipated having to repaint the entire wall so that the color matches the rest of the walls.

The carpet is actually the hardest bit. They have to soak, blot up, and resoak the carpet over and over again. Theon’s carpet is cream colored, so the rusty red tinge lingers stubbornly with each blot. 

“Maybe we just have to patch in new carpet,” Grey mutters, getting tired and impatient now.

“Ah, well, let’s try to do this a few more times,” she suggests. “I think it’s still getting lighter.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


It’s hard to tell exactly how good the carpet looks under the warm bedroom light, but she thinks it looks pretty good. She continues to work on it as Grey strips Theon’s bed and starts to run the sheets and bedding in the wash. He tiredly tells her he fucked up — and it’s alarming to her for a second because he says severe things very casually all the time, so it’s hard to know when to take him seriously sometimes. 

He tells her, “I should’ve put his bed in the wash way earlier. It’s an hour before it’s done and I can stuff it in the dryer. You can go home if you want. The carpet looks great. Thanks.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She decides to stay with him. They have nothing to do besides wait for the washer to finish its cycle, so after they wash the shit out of their hands and throw all of their supplies into a garbage bag, they sit against the wall and watch the washing machine finish up. He tells her he doesn’t want the bedding to get that mildew smell because he let it sit all wet overnight. He tells her Yara can make the bed later, as long as he gets the shit into the dryer before he leaves.

Sitting on the hardwood floor, with her side lightly touching his warmth, Missandei quietly says, “I thought he was doing well. He seemed like he was doing very well and was happy.”

Grey sighs. Very quietly, like he’s sharing a secret, he says, “You know what? I thought so, too. I’m very stunned. I’m just . . . in disbelief.”

And then, kind of bluntly — because she’s been thinking about this a lot — ever since she learned what has happened — and maybe ever since they have gotten close, she asks, “Do you think about it, too? Killing yourself?”

His answer comes pretty quickly. He says, “Sometimes. A lot more often right after Bolton. A lot during Valyria.”

“And now?”

“I don’t think it’s as urgent now,” he says. “I feel a lot of guilt over it all — how my parents would blame themselves if I did it, how they wouldn't understand it. I don’t want them to go through that.”

“Would you tell me,” she asks carefully, “if you were planning on doing it?”

“Probably not,” he says. “I wouldn’t be in the right frame of mind to think about telling you.”

“Does this affect . . . how close you let me get to you?” she asks. 

“Probably,” he says, watching the sudsy bedding spin. “I haven’t really thought about it with any depth before.”

“Do you think you are subconsciously keeping me at arm’s length because you don’t want me to blame myself if something else bad happens to you?”

“I don’t know,” he says, shutting his eyes. “Again, I haven’t thought about it enough to know.” He is tired and this is the kind of conversation that he basically never wants to have with anybody.

“Okay,” she says quietly — kind of meekly.

  
  
  
  
  
  


There’s still a good half an hour left before the end of the wash cycle. The buttons on Theon’s duvet cover hits against the glass door of the washing machine, resulting in this clicking, rhythmic sound. He thinks back to a lot of stray moments, stray observations he has made. He bitterly thinks that he’s supposed to be really good at reading people and knowing where they are at. He thinks that he’s a shitty friend because he did not see this — at all. With shame, he thinks about how he was envious of Theon’s apparent healing, how Theon seemed to have it all figured out while Grey was still bad at tending to his stomach pains. 

He thinks about the year in the Summer Isles, right after Bolton, and how he used to tell himself that he wanted to kill himself all the time. He used to tell himself it was a joke to make it sound okay.

“Theon and Ruby broke up, you know,” he tells her, contending with this inner tension and this growing sense of anger and self-righteousness. “And all night, that’s been hanging over our heads. Yara and Balon blame Ruby for Theon trying to kill himself — because Ruby broke up with him and devastated him. And maybe he did this because she was his reason for living and now he doesn’t have a reason anymore. Maybe I don’t want that to happen to me — because I  _ can’t _ do that to my parents. I can’t put them through  _ another  _ traumatic experience where they worry I’m dead again — just because I can’t handle loss. Maybe that’s why I have to be very careful about who I let into my life.”

After a pause — he can hear himself breathing heavily — she tries to reach out to hold his hand — he takes it away — and then she sighs. She softly says, “I’m not going to leave you, Grey.”

Which is the empty reassurance that he has been waiting for. She fell right into his trap. 

He is shaking his head, refuting her in his brain already. She is wrong. He saying, “You actually can’t promise that. No one can. Feelings change. Or maybe you actually die right in front of my face because something fucking terrible happens because our job is shitty — why do you want me to be with me, anyway!”

She is startled — because he has started yelling.

“Have  _ you _ examined that?” he snaps. “Why do you think you love me? What great qualities do you think I have? Is it my inability to be happy! Is it my inability to want happiness! Is it because  _ you feel guilty _ about leaving me behind so you will misguidedly bend over backwards trying to make it up to me! Listen, you don’t have to do  _ this _ to make it up to me. It doesn’t bother me. I forced the decision on you — it wasn't your fault you had to leave me behind. We can be friends. You don’t have to sacrifice yourself and push it. You can date other people who are more suited to your life and what you are needing from a relationship. You can date someone who doesn’t fucking tie you up and gag you during sex because he is an asshole who is also  _ fucking nuts.  _ You can date someone with a penis, you know.”

“Wait,” she cuts in. “Is that what you’ve been — do you think — Grey —”

“I am going to have a meltdown if you assure me that it doesn’t matter to you,” he says warningly. “I know you’re lying because  _ of course it does.  _ It matters.”

“Grey, it  _ doesn’t  _ matter —”

“Dude, I’m just a project to you!” he shouts — at the washing machine because he can’t bear to look at her. “I know you don’t see it like that. I know you believe what you’re saying to me. But I know I’m just a project to you because you like  _ saving people, _ Missandei. You like saving wounded, vulnerable people — that’s your entire purpose in life. That’s why you have the job that you sought out. And that’s cool — when it’s your job. But you can’t have an entire relationship like that. You will get sick of it — you will eventually get sick of my unwillingness to heal and change. And then you will leave. And by that point, I will have gotten  _ very attached  _ to you. And it will probably hurt unimaginably for me. And I don’t want to . . .  _ fuck up _ my parents because I made a stupid decision at this juncture in my life. So, for the sake of my family — for the people  _ I love, _ please, just let me go. You can’t save everyone, man. I feel like we learn this every day, on the job. We must internalize this  _ better.” _

  
  
  
  
  
  


He is breathing pretty hard after the end of his speech. His eyes are hot and he’s kind of on the verge of tearing up. He thinks back to the last time he cried — it was probably when he choked a poor, innocent woman who was trying to help him with chains, in Valyria. He felt really terrible about that, and he was also sure he was about to die.

The silence that ensues from his grand speech is thick and heavy — it also quickly stretches out and because a long silence, which allows him to immediately relive what he  _ just said  _ to her. 

“Do I get to say something now?” she says quietly — forcefully.

The washing machine chimes. He feels like a real dumbass now. He feels like he said too much, and it was all disgusting and unmanly. He pushes himself from off the floor to pull the wet bedding and transfer it to the dryer. He says, “Go for it.”

“I will be your friend — totally,” she says. “I would love to be your friend. Yes, I’m all for that.” 

And then in fragments — as he loads the dryer — she tries to address the important parts of what he just said. She wants to refute the important parts. She has to talk to his back — by his own design. She doesn’t love it. She would rather talk to his face. But she understands that this feels more comfortable for him.

To his back, she says, “You’re so smart. You’re so manipulative, too. In that really good way. You are so good at convincing my brain of the things you believe in — so I hear you. Everything you said, I hear you.”

She says, “Your friend almost died tonight. I know you are hurting a lot over this. I know you are trying to find some control over stuff because you feel so hurt — that’s why we just cleaned Theon’s room, right?”

He continues not to respond to her — he just continues to listen and load the machine — ever so slowly — so she says, “You actually don’t know how I feel about you because you never ask for the details. You also can’t tell the future, so you don’t know how stuff will end. You have guessed outcomes really pessimistically before, and you have been really wrong before. You thought you were going to die in Valyria for instance. And we got you back. You thought the Baelish raid was going to go to shit — and it went off without a hitch."

“You also can’t tell me how to feel, man," she tells him. "I never said you have to  _ be with me forever. _ I just said I care about you — a lot. And I want whatever space in your life that you are comfortable giving. I appreciate that you asked me to come help you clean up blood tonight. I’m glad you didn’t do this alone."

“You are also not Theon," she adds. "And I’m not Ruby. Like, you have been through a lot of therapy. I don’t think Theon continued therapy. I don’t wear cardigans that much? And also, your parents are awesome, and they love you. Theon’s dad is so shitty. That makes a difference, too —”

“Okay, my dad has been distant lately,” he interjects, shutting the dryer door. He is interjecting on this minor point because he does not have fucking jack to say in response to the other damning things she just laid down.

“What?” she asks curiously, easily switching moods. “What do you mean your dad has been distant?”

“He doesn’t want to talk to me as much as my mom does,” he explains, as he turns on the dryer.

“Your mom wants to talk to you all the time, though,” she says. “I think most people do not want to talk to you as much as your mom does.”

“I just know my dad, okay?” he says, vaguely. He turns around to face her again. “There’s a vibe I’m getting from him.”

“So why don’t you ask him about it?” she suggests.

He sighs. “Because he might say, ‘Grey, you have done something that has forever-changed the way I see you. I love you but I no longer respect you, and I can never feel respect for you again.’ I am not ready to hear that from my dad, Missandei.”

She is shaking her head. “Why do you think he’s going to say that? That’s  _ drastic, _ Grey.”

He shrugs. He still largely feels like a real idiot.

“See, this is one of the things I love about you,” she says, pushing herself to her feet also. He has the bag of garbage in his hand. “You’re deeply sensitive and that’s why you’re good at what you do, but you like to hide what a bundle of feelings you are because you are scared of being hurt.”

“Oh my God,” he mutters, looking around real quick at their immediate surroundings. It’s time to leave. “Yeah, that’s totally me. Shut up. Do you have everything? Your phone?”

“Got everything.” 

And as they walk down the stairs, he hears her ask — from behind him — “What are you up to tomorrow?”

“Probably try to see Theon and see if he’s awake,” he says. “Probably bombard him with questions even though he’s probably going through it right now. Probably tell him he needs to get some help, holy shit. You?”

“Grabbing lunch with some college friends,” she says, after they quickly walk to the front door, as he starts locking up with his picks. “Probably going to be bored because I get so bored now, when people talk about normal stuff and not murder-y, human-traffick-y stuff.”

“Cool,” he mutters, concentrating.

“Wanna maybe grab dinner together?” she asks. 

He shrugs. “I dunno. Maybe? Can I tell you later?”

“Yeah, text me.”

  
  
  
  
  
  



	69. Grey realizes he is self-centered

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this ep, our hero (Missandei) continues living her crankiest life because her job is gunning for her to get killed because they don't want to pay to upgrade equipment. The love of her life is doing some self-examination and realizes that he's really self-involved and maybe that's why his dad doesn't love him anymore. THEN, he tries to do something about it!

 

 

 

Grey completely ghosts her on Sunday so they do not have dinner, which does not surprise her whatsoever so her feelings aren’t that hurt. She just maintains her mild exasperation over this guy’s unwillingness to just let her stare at him adoringly for long uninterrupted minutes like a total creepster as they share a meal together. 

She becomes the kind of woman that her best friend has little respect for. She actually goes over to Dany’s new house to watch Dany resentfully throw tennis balls around the freezing cold back yard with an unfashionable purple parka on. 

“I got it on clearance in a fucking dumpster fire of a store for poor people because that’s where I shop now,” Dany explains mutinously. 

“Wow, that’s so classist,” Missy mildly says.

“Relax. Grey isn’t around to be impressed with how woke you are.”

Missy rolls her eyes and just continues hanging out underneath a thick blanket as she watches Dany freak out when the dogs track mud inside the house. They talk about whether or not it will actually snow for the first time in years. They also talk about Dany’s hatred of her new job and her new life in between the stressful moments of Dany’s seething anger over whatever it is that the dogs are doing — mostly playing. 

Missandei tries to entertain her bff with her incessant bitching and moaning over a man.

In a whine, she says, “I just want to snuggle a little bit together on the couch! I just want to give him a shoulder massage sometimes! I just want to hear the melodious music of his malicious and sadistic laughing! Dany, do you think me being too available is disgusting to him?”

“Yes,” Dany says, answering right away, because she is pretty much  _ over  _ listening to Missandei’s stupid man problems. The problems are stupid. And so is the man.

“Really?”

Dany shrugs. “I personally hate neediness. It’s not a turn on. Maybe he feels the same way?”

Missandei lets her shoulders slump over in defeat. “I’m not going to play mind games to get him to like me. I’m clingy and I wear my heart on my sleeve and I am brave because I tell him how I feel about him all the time! He needs to know that!”

“He already knows, babe,” Dany supplies. “I think he already knows what you’re about.”

“I watched an indie movie about this,” Missandei says suddenly, cinching the blanket tighter around her shoulders.

“Was it called ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’?”

“No, I said it was an indie flick,” Missandei responds. “And  _ hello,  _ he’s obsessed with me. He’s totally into me.”

“I love the confidence — coupled with the crippling insecurity,” Dany says. “Wait, so what was the movie about?”

“About a dude who keeps pining after a girl who doesn’t reciprocate,” Missy explains. “In the end, they break up and he just meets someone else who is capable of loving him.”

“Wowww.”

“Yeah, it was a real depressing watch. Thank goodness I don’t believe in signs from the universe — and I don’t listen to the good advice of my friends.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


On Monday evening, before the night shift starts, they are waiting for Drogo to come in and tell them they are stupid, probably, though they do hold out hope that maybe this meeting is actually about equipment upgrade and Drogo wants them to lead the charge on putting in the purchase request or something else menial. 

Drogo is running late for a reason that he has not bothered to tell them about or apologized for.

“How you gonna sequester the dynamic duo to a holding pen like this?” Daario mutters, checking his watch again.

“What?” 

Daario has started calling them the dynamic duo — because he likes bland nicknames and their one commonality is that they are both in love with people who generally want nothing to do with them. 

When Daario explains this to her, Missandei is like, “Hey, don’t compare your toxic thing with Dany to my beautiful and pure thing with Grey.”

Daario doesn’t laugh, because he doesn’t understand that it’s a joke — probably because he doesn’t think women can be funny. Instead, he pauses pregnantly, and gives the empty room the side-eye, because the small conference room is the only witness to this exchange — and then he says, “Do you dance?”

“I don’t know,  _ do you?”  _ she says, pretty aggressively because she is really annoyed with him already and low-key hurt that he said Grey wants nothing to do with her.

“What am I even saying?” he says rhetorically to himself. “Of course you don’t dance. I totally forgot how uncomfortable you are in your body.”

“Um,  _ what?” _

He gestures to her outfit, her neon pink dress underneath the crinkly parachute material of her issued black windbreaker. It’s really good underneath rain. 

She crosses her arms haughtily over her boobs. “It’s  _ cold  _ in here.”

“This is probably why Grey won’t sleep with you,” Daario mutters, already hiding his smile by turning his face away momentarily. “You are kind of mean and defensive. Anyway, shut up. I’m wondering —”

“Other D, don’t tell me to shut up —”

“I didn’t mean it like that, babe. Anyway — my best friend is getting married —”

“You have a  _ friend?” _

“And why am I Other D when Drogo isn’t  _ even in the room? _ By the way, I have  _ so many  _ friends.”

“Drogo is always the big D —” Missandei stops short at that. And then she makes a face. “I didn’t mean to say that. I don’t give a shit about his D.” 

“Missandei,” Daario says, sighing now — because she is  _ exhausting, _ and he doesn’t know how Grey puts up with it. “Do you want to be my date to this wedding?”

“No,” she says, automatically — right away — just to hurt him.

He is unfazed. “Come on. You’re my third choice and second ask.” 

Right then, the door gets pushed right into the wall with a loudness that is completely unnecessary because the door was  _ already open.  _ Drogo’s tense face and his tense body enters the space soon after, sucking up all joy and fun in his wake.

“Okay, we gotta bring the numbers up,” Drogo tells them right away, as he places his laptop down on the table. “Leadership is on my ass because we’re budgeting for next year, and they are not budging on increasing my budget. I need to show them some compelling metrics in the next few weeks, guys.”

“Oh, so this isn’t a talk about how we’re gonna get a new comms system?” Missy asks in a deadpan. “Yeah, I guess I can be a more efficient prostitute and start aggressively grabbing dicks and telling everyone if they try they have to buy — to get your numbers up.”

“Atta girl,” Drogo mutters, turning on his laptop. “And this  _ is  _ a talk about getting you your new shit.  _ This _ is how you get your shit.”

“I guess finally apprehending a career trafficker wasn’t enough,” she says.

“Missandei, we get it — you’re an unhappy smartass,” Drogo says. “And _ alleged trafficker. _ He hasn’t been convicted yet — as leadership keeps reminding me. That’s part of the reason why we might have to wait another year for an increase in budget.”

“That’s fucking crazy,” Daario says. “She can like, die in that year because of comms failure.”

_ “I know,” _ Drogo gripes. “Why do you think I’m so fucking stressed out? Do I want one of you to die because the equipment goes dark? No, I do not.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


On Tuesday during lunch, he acts like everything is normal, and she lets it go without comment or pointed looks because she knows that the Theon thing really weighs on him. She just puts up with his unpredictable mood and hands him over her hot sauce when he pokes her in the shoulder and says, “Hey, can I get summa that?”

She sees that he has a full plate of tacos. She also sees a small smile on his face — it  _ might _ be apologetic — or it might just be awkward. 

As he douses his tacos in hot sauce, right at an empty corner of her table because she’s sitting apart from the rest of their team members because she has been putting in a fair bit of overtime the past month, already trying to fruitlessly get their numbers up before Drogo’s real talk with them. She’s pretty much utterly sick of all of their faces. 

There’s a moment when he looks conflicted — after he’s done dressing his tacos. 

“How are you?” she asks.

“I’m good,” he says, shifting around on his feet. “For the most part.”

“That’s good,” she says. And then she juts her chin out at the other table where Robb, Gendry, and Daario are. “It’s cool if you want to eat with them. You don’t have to stay here.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


On Thursday, he tells Sam that he spent his week just physically inert but mentally flexing a lot. He is exhausted because he’s such a fucking dumbass. He tells Sam that he spent the better part of the week trying to convince himself that it’s a good idea to talk to his dad, to ask his dad why his dad doesn’t love him anymore. He has found that just the idea of getting a definitive answer that will just gut him really fucking bums him out. 

He tells Sam that he thinks that there should be more clear cut payoffs for truth telling because people are always harping on about how it’s a pillar of healthy relationships, but sometimes it feels like his worst fears have come to life. His dad knows who he is now. And they are as distant as they have ever been. Grey has nowhere else to go from here. There’s no more truth he can tell to rectify the fact that he’s a violent thug for a foreign government. 

He tells Sam he’s been reading a lot about substance addiction, namely how it affects loved ones. He read that sometimes the parents of addicts have to emotionally disconnect from their children because it is the only way they can cope. Grey speculates that maybe this is what his dad is doing. 

And to drive the knife into his heart further, he tells Sam that he also keeps thinking back to his childhood, and how his dad used to catch him studying obsessive. His dad’s big paw of a hand used to shut his book with a snap, jarring him, and then his dad made him crawl into the car as they went to go do something fun — like get ice cream or go to the beach. 

He tells Sam that he’s ruining everything with Missandei and soon, they won’t even be friends because she will finally be sick of his shit and realize that she does not have to put up with any of it. He tells Sam that bums him out, too. But he doesn't know what to do about it. He’s still a ways off from being ready for a relationship. 

Finally, he tells Sam that he is blocked from seeing Theon because the Greyjoys know  _ all about  _ healthy emotional processing. He tells Sam that when he texted Yara to ask her when is a good time for him to visit again, she basically told him that it’s not really gonna be a good time ever in the near future. She told him that they want to keep it family-only for now, for Theon’s sake. 

Grey tells Sam that he knows a kiss-off when he sees one — he just wants to know why Yara even reached out to him to begin with, if she was only going to end up shutting him out and insisting on making things worse for Theon by following whatever their dad wants. Grey just wants to know if they are all going to act shocked and surprised when Theon tries to kill himself again later and manages to be successful.   

“They just don’t get it at all,” Grey says. “They don’t get that bullying and ridiculing a suicidal person and telling him to man up isn’t really a smart way to make him want to live.”

“You really think that’s what they are doing?” Sam asks.

“Uh,  _ yeah,”  _ Grey says. “Have you met Balon Greyjoy?”

“He’s crossed my office a few times,” Sam says vaguely. 

Grey raises his brows and gives Sam a pointed look, which Sam neutrally accepts. 

“Statistically, most people who attempt suicide and survive do not attempt suicide again,” Sam tells him, after a pause. “About seventy percent of people.”

Grey leans back in his seat and sighs. He says, “Thanks, doc. That information is comforting.”

“I know you are worried about him.”

And then, seemingly out of nowhere — but not actually because he’s been thinking about all of this  _ obsessively  _ for the last week — Grey clears his throat and frankly says, “Sam, I am pretty sure you are right. I am pretty sure I’m depressed. I am pretty sure I have symptoms of PTSD. I just feel like everything I do is pointless most of the time, and I feel like my brain is this asshole trying to trick me into dying all the time. I think I’m sad, but sad is so normal for me that I don’t know if it’s sadness or if what I’m feeling is just normal stuff. Is there a medication or a procedure that will fix me? And will being diagnosed and medicated . . . take me out of the field? Because I think being trapped at a desk will make me even sadder and more . . . hopeless.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


There is no way for them to get their numbers up with their shitty system because standard operating procedure dictates that they pull out and reset when the equipment goes dark. She is not to continue on blind. 

King’s Landing has been unseasonably cold lately, so she has been freezing her sleep-deprived ass out there wearing skimpy clothes, doing a lot of pointless waiting as she does mental math and figures out that they are not going to get an equipment upgrade at all — it’s a fool's errand. She has to shiver standing around with Grey hovering close by, thinking about how they are not even fucking asking for more than a standard of living raise. No one is asking for more salary. They are fucking asking for  _ shit to work correctly  _ as they are  _ constantly  _ penalized for  _ doing their best _ under a bunch of stupid and shitty rules that bureaucrats who are out of touch make up. She is ticked that the people that they work for truly do not give one shit about what happens to them at all.

She does goes through the rest of the shift pissed off and quiet outside of work. She doesn’t act out or take unnecessary risks because she’s not going to be the one to prove a point by getting hurt. 

After they finish resetting, she goes back to her post. She thinks about how it’s actually incredibly dangerous for women to work in these conditions. She thinks about how a website like Baelish’s at least affords them these layers in which to vet prospective clients. Working like this — just out in the open and bare — exposes them to any color of shittiness. 

She thinks about how everything continues to be frustratingly opaque and complicated.

When a car pulls up, she bends down and tries to see the face of her maybe future-assaulter. Or maybe he’s just sad and lonely and harmless. She pulls the flap of her jacket off of her body so that he can see more of it. She says, “Hey, baby.”

He says, “Hi! Aren’t you cold? It’s so cold outside!”

Which almost makes her rolls her eyes. She is  _ freezing. _

  
  


  
  
  


He starts crying right in front of her as they cuff him and pull him aside for questioning. The crying leaves her cold inside. He has switched from his awkwardly filthy talk to this off-putting tearful whine about how they are about to ruin his marriage. 

With a Naathi accent, he tells her to please not tell his wife.

In the Common Tongue, she responds to him with, “How did you know about this spot? How did you learn about it?” 

They have years and years worth of arrest records and maps and maps of hotspots all over the city. Citizens do not. This is how they tracked down Baelish. Through months worth of repetitive information gathering. It took additional years to gather enough evidence and to wait for a law to get signed so that they could charge him. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Probably for the first time in a really long while — because he’s so fucking self-involved — he finally  _ looks _ and he finally actually realizes that . . . she is struggling, too. 

Over the comms, he heard her not respond to any of Daario’s jokes or many of Robb’s harmless questions and small talk. During the shift, he saw her body shaking from the cold and he saw how tense she stood as she waited for their equipment to get back online. 

Right when they are done, Robb quickly rushes her into their van where a warm blanket that has been draped over the heater has been waiting for her. Grey watches as Robb really carefully and tenderly bundles her up and rubs up and down her covered shoulders and arms to get her circulation going. Robb starts asking her questions about her well-being. He asks her if she’s tired, if she’s hungry, if she needs water or anything. 

Grey silently observes that all of this stuff — this nurturing stuff — just comes so easy to Robb. Robb has been fixating on whether or not he’s ready to be a dad — and Grey does not think that it’s something Robb really needs to worry that much about.

  
  
  
  
  
  


“Do you want to grab a bite?” he asks her suddenly, manifesting right next to her car.

She clutches at her chest dramatically. She says, “Grey! You scared me!”

“Sorry,” he says, although he doesn’t sound sorry at all. 

She gives him a short glance as she pops open her trunk and loads her duffle of her clothes that need to be washed into the back. She asks him, “When?” before she shuts the trunk again.

“I was thinking right now?”

It is four in the morning right now. She thinks that he has terrible timing, and he has to be doing this on purpose. She thinks that maybe he has something he wants to talk to her about — maybe something Theon-related that he wants to get off his chest. She thinks that even though she is completely exhausted and all she wants to do is go home and sleep — it takes considerable effort for him to reach out to her, so she must be available to him. 

So she says, “Sure.”

  
  
  
  


 


	70. Missy is not cute

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this ep, Missy spends the night at Grey's platonically again. He never gets a chance to BE THERE for her because he's bad at it and she's totally clueless that he's trying. Then on the other side of town, she just gets a lot of grief from her aunties because she doesn't look cute enough to land a man.

  
  
  
  
  


 

She expects for them to go to a diner because it’s the only place open at this time of day, but actually, he leads them back to his apartment. 

She kind of pats her hair self-consciously, standing in the middle of his living room. She is still wearing her hooker clothes underneath her humongous windbreaker. Her face is still caked with makeup. She thinks that this is odd and out of character for them. She thought she was going to have the opportunity to be a sad cliche in a diner.

And then she raises her brow when, instead of talking to her, he runs to his kitchen.

“You don’t have to make me food,” she tells him as he fiddles around in his fridge. “I’m not that hungry.” And then she shakes the fog from her brain and says, “Oh crap, let me text my dad. He usually is up by the time I get home and he has snacks for me. I need to tell him to put the snacks away.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


After she makes it clear that he is  _ not _ to cook for her at freaking almost five in the morning, he looks helpless and uncomfortable in his own home.

She anticipates that she will need to put in about half an hour of time talking with him about what is going on with him and what is bothering him before she has to get up and make her way home. She tries to be efficient about it because she doesn’t do that weird sleep thing that he does, where she sleeps very little during the week and then a lot on weekends. She needs sleep every day. 

She has a cup of tea in her hands, and she’s sitting on his couch with her bare legs folded underneath her. She tiredly tries to cut to the chase by saying, “What’s up, Grey? What’s been on your mind?”

He’s sitting on the other end of his couch. He responds with, “How — how are you? How are you doing?”

“Fine?” she says, her voice lilting in slight confusion. 

“How’s your family?”

Now she is  _ really confused. _ She says, “They are fine?”

The question at the end of her statements is also making him confused. It is making him feel like he’s missing something. He says, “Are they?”

“I think they are?”

“Really?”

“Are they  _ not?”  _ she asks, going a little rigid. “Do you know something I don’t know? Do you have a connection in the PD? Is something going on with my brothers?”

“Huh? I don’t know? Are your brothers okay?”

“What? I don’t know!  _ Are  _ they okay, Grey?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


It takes a few bewildering minutes to get back on the same page — to realize that they totally just accidentally confused and freaked out each other. 

It takes a few more minutes for her to get calmly fed up with his really bizarre bush-beating — a few minutes before she straight up asks him, “Why am I here? What did you want to talk to me about so urgently? Is it about Theon?”

He shakes his head — now just regretting everything because he’s an idiot and he sucks at this so bad. He is also now really mired in an old standby: guilt. He feels guilt because now he is realizing that he’s a fucking emotional leech, not just with her, but also with Sam and Drogo and his mom and dad and brother and  _ maybe  _ this is why his dad has been standoffish with him. Maybe his dad is just sick of his love and care not being reciprocated _ enough. _

Grey realizes that it is not fucking rewarding for anyone, being close to him at all. All he is good at is exhausting people.

Carefully, he says, “I just . . . wanted to spend some time with you. You seemed like you were having a bit of a bad night.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She laughs in relief when she realizes that he’s just being emotionally thick, and not what she feared — which was that he was spiraling again. She collapses down against his couch cushions, rolling over to bury her laugh into a pillow that he keeps there for naps. Her cheek just grazes it before she realizes she still has makeup on and she’s going to smear it all over his stuff. 

So with new, fortifying energy, she hops to her feet and tells him she’s going to go wash her face. 

In the bathroom, she picks up one of her old hair ties and pulls her hair off of her neck and gathers it all in a ball on top of her head. Also in the bathroom, she unzips the material of her windbreaker, catches what she’s got on underneath, and thinks  _ whoa  _ to herself. 

Standing at the door to his bedroom, she calls out to him in the living room, making him twist his body to look at her. 

She asks him if she can borrow some clothes, standing there with the flaps of her jacket open and framing her body. 

He’s staring at her — there is a lengthy pause — probably because he is actually  _ considering _ whether or not he wants to let her borrow his shit so she doesn’t have to sit around in an uncomfortable tight dress as they hang out.

Then he swallows. Then he says, “Yeah. Of course. Take what you need.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


She changes her clothes in his bedroom after he runs in there without looking at her face to quickly throw a few things — towels and a white undershirt — into his hamper and to show her to his closet, which is pretty intuitive stuff, but he’s really inexplicably and predictably anxious again. She looks at him in amusement as he mutters apologies to her, that she has to look at the terrible state of his ultra-neat, ultra-clean bedroom.

He shuts the door to his bedroom firmly behind him to give her privacy.

She starts digging through his closet — which is both novel and familiar to her. She picks out clothes that look the comfiest — that look the most intimate. She tries to pick out clothes that he maybe loves the most and has had the longest relationship with. She brings the clothes and lays them on his bed as she changes.

She strips down to her underwear and takes off her bra, and she looks down at his bed as she does it. 

And then she quickly throws on a t-shirt with a logo she doesn’t recognize — from the Summer Isles. She puts on sweatpants that are roomy and baggy.  

She has her own clothes bunched up in her hands as she walks out of the bedroom. She asks, “Do you have a plastic bag I can put this in?”

“I can wash it for you,” he says quickly — nervously — getting up from the couch and kind of leaping into action right away.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” tightening her hold on her own clothes as he tries to pull it out of her grasp. “I have a whole load of laundry to do in my trunk anyway. I’ll just do it when I get home.”

“I can wash that stuff, too,” he offers. “All of your clothes.”

She scrunches up her face. “No, that’s okay,” she says. She doesn’t want him to clean up after her or to worry about this when he must have other stuff on his mind.

“No, really,” he says, letting go of her dress, already back at the front door — he looks like he’s on the verge of running away — he’s already stepping into his running shoes. Presumably, he’s actually going to go grab her duffle from her car. “It’s cool. It’s easy. It’s not a big deal.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He takes a little bit longer to retrieve her clothes than expected — probably because she didn’t get a chance to tell him where she parked before he was a puff of smoke and she was left alone in his apartment.

She situates herself back on the couch and thinks about how weird he is being right now. Weird and still really freaking cute. 

She runs her hands over his pillow. And then the material of his IKEA sofa. She remembers how much he unfairly hates this thing. She also remembers how he needed to go put a towel down before they had sex on this thing, the few times they had sex outside of the bedroom.

That memory kind of makes her sad and nostalgic and feel warm and fond of him and missing him all at once. So she tortures herself by lying down. She smells his pillow, and it smells like him and that kind of makes her heart pang and makes her want to tear up.

She yawns instead, burying her face into his pillow to stifle it. She tells herself that she will just shut her eyes until he gets back. Then they can have their chat.

That’s about as far as she gets before she starts sleeping hardcore, catching up on weeks and weeks of overtime.

  
  
  
  
  
  


That’s how he finds her, when he comes back to her with her duffle bag. He’s panting a little bit — not because running back up was strenuous, but because he is  _ stressed out,  _ and he doesn’t even know what the fuck he is  _ doing _ right now. 

He finds her sleeping peacefully in the fetal position on his couch.

And then he actually slaps himself in the face because he’s a  _ fucking moron.  _ He shakes his head at himself as he takes her duffle and picks up the little bundle of her night work clothes and her bra and takes it over to his stacked washer and dryer combo.  

After loading the machine, he sends his eyes heavenward and just internally asks himself what the fuck he is even doing right now.

And then he goes into his bedroom to strip his comforter off of it because the last time she slept over, she really liked his comforter. 

He throws the blanket on top of her body because he doesn’t think it’s cool to try and move an unconscious woman who got stuck at his apartment because he’s an emotionally constipated moron who can’t fucking do shit that most adults can do. He doesn’t think it’s cool to pick her up and put her in his bed like she’s decoration or an accessory of his life. He doesn’t want to look like he gets any kind of gratification from this dynamic. He knows that she will wake up sore because she slept on a couch and wonder why he just left her here like that. She will not know that he has all of these stupidly convoluted reasons for why he doesn’t make her more comfortable. She won’t know that he’s trying to do right by her in ways that are not at all apparent to normal people.

He doesn’t let himself look at her or touch her while she’s sleeping, because he doesn’t think it’s right for him to touch her while she’s unconscious, when he has a hard time doing when she is awake. It’s not fair.

  
  
  
  
  
  


After he wakes up — in his own bed, underneath a spare blanket he pulled from his closet — he sees his gun on his nightstand through the sun haze that his blackout curtains have valiantly pushed back. He groans because his gun makes him looks fucking crazy. He rubs at his dry eyes and blindly opens the drawer to slide the gun into it so he doesn’t have to see it. 

He bashfully sees that it’s almost noon by looking at his phone — and he steels himself for an apology — he’s going to give her one — and he’s going to be ready to answer the onslaught of her questions and inquiries on how he is feeling and how he is doing because he has done this to them.

But actually, he finds his living room empty. He finds his comforter neatly folded and placed at the end. He finds a stack of his clothes sitting atop of the blanket. 

He also finds that his washer and dryer is empty — she took her clothes when she left.

He’s on the verge of having the gall to feel a little hurt over this — but then he finds the note that she left for him on his kitchen counter. She wrote it on a paper towel in a blue ballpoint pen. He rarely sees her handwriting, so he kind of notes in surprise that her handwriting is sloppier and more connected than he thought it’d be. She writes in cursive. It’s almost a touch illegible.

She signed the note with a heart — and it’s not as corny as he thinks such a thing would look.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She pretty much expects to hear all about how hideous she looks during brunch at her auntie’s because that’s what she gets for doing her very best and constantly falling short of what people expect from her.

She doesn’t have time to shower — she barely has time to put on normal clothes and brush her teeth after she gets home. She runs to her dad’s waiting car in her thick-rimmed glasses, flip flops, and profusely apologizes for being home late and for making him late as he tells her to put on real shoes.

She tells him, “It’s okay! Gun it, Dad!” 

He says, “Honey, it’s fine. We don’t have to rush.”

Her dad is totally wrong. They are half an hour late and when they gets there, everyone else is already there. Her auntie tells her that the food is cold now but it will probably still taste good, and Missandei just wants to  _ die in shame _ over that. She actually flushes and starts stuttering excuses for her dad because she doesn’t want her dad to get grief from his wife’s sister just because his daughter can’t get her shit together enough. 

“Baby, your hair,” one of her other aunties cuts in, before she actually licks her hand and reaches out to try to press down Missandei’s baby hairs with her spit.

Missy internally screams — and then just takes it.  

“Baby, you couldn’t put on a little bit of makeup?” another auntie asks.

“Ugh, your skin.”

Missy immediately touches the blemishes on her face — she’s pretty sure she has zits because she cakes on so much makeup for work and clogs her pores with shit makeup and no air. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


It takes about twenty minutes for her aunties to move past how old she is now and how alone and hopelessly manless she still is. It takes twenty minutes of suggestions and tips on how to be more appealing to men — consisting of gems like “look less tired” and “smile more.” 

She gets a break when her cousin and her cousin’s husband and family arrives — a whopping hour late. The kids rush in. There’s a waft of perfume and cologne and a box of pears that gets unloaded onto the kitchen island. It makes Missy realize that she totally sucks and never brings stuff to family gathering. It must be embarrassing for her dad. 

Her cousin gets no shit from their aunts at all.

She finds her dad and her brother sitting around in front of the TV with the uncles, watching the freaking golf channel. She clicks beer bottlenecks with everyone before she squeezes in tight between her brother and the couch’s arm.

“Oh my God, your huge ass is sitting on me!” Moss gripes, as he simultaneously makes more space for her. It’s just him and his family today. Mars is working.

  
  
  
  
  
  


She wants to keep sleeping because golf is so freaking boring. She is counting down the minutes until she can suggest to her dad that maybe it’s time to leave. She sometimes leans her face against her brother’s shoulder as she drifts off and then is jolted back into embarrassed awakeness when he shifts a little bit.  

And then, as her dad talks about cars with her uncles — very very quietly, she hears her brother say, “I know why you were late. I know a walk of shame when I see one.” He is grinning at her.  

She rolls her eyes. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


So her brother knows about Grey — just the reputation, just from stories, from the news, and from the intense stint of her depression when Grey was stuck in Valyria. 

So her brother starts to regale her with stories about the number of relationship successes that he has witnessed in his career in law enforcement, when partners start crossing lines and sleeping with each other. He tells her it’s a fat zero. He has never seen this be successful because there’s this inherent dysfunction that drives the attraction and the relationship. Partners only see one really limited aspect of each other and they get to see each other during moments of high adrenaline. 

“Shit goes to shit when you have to like, balance a checkbook or go grocery shopping together. Also, a lot of the time, someone is married. Is he married?”

“No, I’m not that dumb,” she mutters. “And by the way. We’re not sleeping together  _ like that. _ Yet. I’m working  _ on it.” _

Her brothers chuckles a little bit. He nudges her. 

And then he tells her that he’s seen careers ruined because of stuff like this. Usually, it’s the woman’s career. That’s just how it is. It’s unfair and it’s a double standard. Women get branded as a certain type. The relationship goes bad and then people get passed over for promotions. And then people start suing. 

“And then pretty soon, you are deeply unhireable and unemployable because people think you are some ridiculous litigious bitch who won’t have other people’s backs. You love your job, Missy. Is this what you want to happen to you? You want to lose your job because you won’t go on Tinder and find a civilian to sleep with like a normal person?” 

“I’m not going to sue my employer,” Missy hisses under her breath.

“What if you get sexually harassed or assaulted on the job by this guy, and they refuse to protect you from him, Missandei?” Moss says back. “You’re just not gonna do anything about that?”

“He won’t sexually assault me — he refuses to. And hey, I already get a lot of sexual harassment on the job.”

“Oh my God, I  _ knew it.  _ You’re in vice. Fuck.”

“It’s classified,” she retorts. “And we call it something different. And duh I’m in vice, Captain Obvious. You’re in narcotics. That’s obvious, too.”

“What the fuck, how is that obvious? You’re stereotyping real hard right now. And that’s not cool.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


On Monday, he spikes a ball of foil at her in the morning, and she nearly knocks over her coffee on her desk in her haste to catch the ball. It is heavy and thick — and warm. 

“What is this?” she asks as she peels back the foil, even as she quickly figures out that it’s food based on the way it smells.

“A snack,” Grey says evasively — vaguely. “Because I owe you one.”

It’s a warm ball of carbs — wrapped in leaves — maybe lentils. It’s a lot like the snacks that his mom used to make for them when she visited. 

“Did you make this?” Missandei asks, as she takes a sniff. 

He feels like her  _ two questions _ so far are interrogating and  _ a lot _ and he regrets this already. He knows he’s fucking nuts.

“Yeah,” he says. “I made a whole batch yesterday. There are dozens more, if you like it and want some more.”

“Ooh, it smells yummy,” she says. “Is it as good as how your mom makes them?”

“There’s no way that it is.”

 

 

 

 


	71. Dany is stealth-fun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this ep, Grey talks to his parents about his past non-drug use and also is tone deaf about his relationship with a really toxic job. Dany is settling into her new life and she completely hates it. She invites her second friend to hang out at her stupid new house and entertains him with scary-sad anecdotes from her childhood. Missy moonlights as a pizza delivery person. Then she watches the love of her life be cute as hell.

  
  


 

During his weekly call with his parents, he forces himself to tell them all about how Dr. Tarly is putting him on some medication because he decides it’s cool to tell them. He decides that it’s more confidential information than it is classified. 

He tells his folks that he has never done drugs — they do not looked shocked whatsoever at this revelation. Nevertheless, he explains to them that he has never done drugs because he is an uncool control freak who hates not being in control, so he has a lot of complicated feelings about the antidepressant Dr. Tarly wants to put him on. 

His parents are stonefaced, so he gets nervous. He starts to ramble and tell them that his job doesn’t allow him to do illegal drugs anyway. He tells them that even if he smokes weed and gets caught, he’d be in so much trouble and could lose his job because the law is weird. Obviously cocaine and heroin are out — but he’s actually heard terrible stories about officers getting addicted on the job — in the course of doing the job — and then dropped by the organization because no one wants a drug addict being a liability when it comes to public safety.

“It’s all pretty fucked up and unfair, pressuring people to get addicted in the line of duty and then dropping them when they are too damaged to do their jobs optimally anymore,” he says. And then he realized what he just said and he gets why his parents are not freaking amused by him at all right now.  

Grey laughs nervously — really nervously as his parents’ impassive faces stare back at him through the monitor. They are looking at him like he’s an idiot who has no self-awareness.

So he changes the subject and tells them he worries that the prescribed drugs will make him shitty at his job because maybe being depressed is what makes him really good at his job. Maybe he will end up making a mistake because he gets all wrapped up in something like the beauty of a sunset and then fucking gets shot in the fucking face because he’s all distracted. 

Christ, this conversation is going really amazingly. He had all these intentions of reassuring his folks that he’s working at getting better, too.

So he pushes forward and tells them that he has been reluctant to get diagnosed because it just doesn’t seem like someone with an anxiety disorder should be around so many fucking  _ guns _ all the time and run teams of other people with  _ guns? _ But when he confessed this to Dr. Tarly, the doc basically told him that he’d be surprised over how many people in the organization suffer from anxiety disorders — and that it actually looks good when individuals proactively reach out and seek help versus suppressing it and forcing their supervisors to send them to therapy.

“Which, you know, totally happened to me,” Grey says, kind of sweating now. “Ha ha, I’m doing everything backwards. And  _ really slowly.”  _

And since no one else in his family is medicated because it’s culturally not the norm — and maybe because he’s the only one of them who is excessively broken by his vocation — and possibly because his parents are completely inscrutable right now — he quickly asks, “What do you think? Ma? Dad? Is this totally nuts?”

“Huh,” his mom finally says. And then in the Summer Tongue, she tells him that he is manic right now, which reminds her of how uptight he was as a kid whenever he thought his teacher was going to give him an A minus because he didn’t cite enough research in an essay. 

In the Common Tongue, his dad says, “We actually talked about this — putting you on medication — with your teacher and doctor, when you were little — when you about 14 years old.”

“What?”

“Yeah, you don’t remember?”

Grey shakes his head. 

“Well, your teacher was concerned. And your doctor said you would probably grow out of it and to hold off on medicating you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, maybe he wasn’t a very good doctor?” his dad offers. “But of course we went with him because we felt he was an expert. And to be honest, we were relieved when he told us you didn’t need to be medicated.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


His parents don’t give him the satisfaction of neat and pat answers. They don’t even give him a chance to rebel against them by decreeing that he is not to medicate himself. 

They just shrug and tell him that it’s up to him to decide what’s best for him — because he’s an adult now and he knows himself best.

He knows it’s unbecoming to throw a hissy fit about how he doesn’t trust his own fucking brain at all so he needs his parents to treat him like a child again just so he can reject their advice in self-righteousness and make everyone labor under his festering and ignored mental illness. 

His parents move on from this fairly quickly — after his dad casually suggests that if Grey gets on meds, it’s probably best to keep it private and to not talk about it very loudly in front of his uncles and aunts the next time he comes to visit.

Grey doesn’t get a chance to examine that, because his mom suddenly can’t take it anymore. She bursts out with her mom guilt.

She says, “Baby, I’m  _ so sorry  _ but we can’t visit you during our holiday break. We talked about it and we think it’s best that we stay home with your brother because your brother has been having a hard time ever since he had to move out of his house and find an apartment. We think your brother would be very lonely if he had to be alone on the holiday — and he can’t take the time off to visit you because he doesn’t have enough vacation time accrued.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He learns that Theon has months and months worth of recovery and a few more surgeries scheduled to repair his body. He learns that Theon’s recovery will be very tough and very arduous and that the doctors aren’t sparing their pragmatism when they talk about what Theon’s challenges are going to be in the coming years. 

Grey learns this because Yara’s lips are loose due to her ongoing frustration with her parents, mostly her dad. He learns that the intention is that as soon as Theon is recovered enough, they are going to commit him to a mental hospital to ‘fix him.’ Grey learns this because Yara complains about dealing with her delusional and out-of-touch parents a lot at work to him and only to him, because he’s the only one outside of the family, as far as she knows, who knows about Theon’s accident.

‘Accident’ is what they are calling it instead of naming it — which seems problematic in so many ways. Grey remembers how the mutilation of his body was referred to as ‘the incident’ and how he felt about that. 

Grey also learns he is still persona non grata because Balon really thinks Grey is the fucking harbinger of doom and doesn’t want Grey’s stink further poisoning his son. Yara doesn’t tell him this in so many words, but he can read between the lines.

He still asks, “Can I see him?”

She grimaces. “It’s not a good time right now.”

“How is he?”

She’s still grimacing. “Not good. Not talkative. A lot like how he was three years ago.”

“Is he asking for me?”

“No, man,” Yara says kind of snottily, bothered that Grey seems kind of judgemental right now. “He hasn’t asked about anyone.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He feels really obligated to be friends with Daenerys because she gave up so much just so he can live. She gave up her job which resulted in this terrible domino effect with the dogs and now this new house. 

This is why he forces himself to spend time with her even though it is still not exactly comfortable being around her. This is why he shows up at her door with a bottle of wine and flowers — which she manages to be kind of annoyed by — because she has to go digging around for a vase to hold the dead flowers until it’s time to throw them away.

Wow. She is completely miserable. This must be what it’s like to be around him.

“I like your new place,” he says after scanning the room. It’s spacious and homey. 

“I fucking think it’s terrible,” she tells him, already working on the bottle of wine.

“Oh, cool.”

Dany had to balance her desire for privacy and space along with her desire for modern amenities and a large back yard. She had to make a lot of concessions. Like, her tastefully decorated house has carpet and a wood burning fireplace in it — two things that she completely hates.

After she pops the cork free from the bottle, she asks him, “So how are you?”

“Fine.”

“Great,” she says, as she starts pouring him a serious glug of wine.

“Ah, Daenerys, that’s enough. I have to drive later.”

“You’ll metabolize it,” she says dismissively, as she starts filling up her own glass.

  
  
  


  
  


Dany lies down on a white day bed that has seen better days — mud stains everywhere — with a thick blanket and her overflowing glass of wine. She leaves him to figure out where to situate himself in relation to her.

He ends up situating himself at the end of her sofa, kind of positioned  awkwardly. Kind of almost behind her head.

So he gets up and shifts the other end, to see her better.

He starts to drink the wine he bought. He bought it for her, with this specific intention of trying to match what she likes. He can tell his efforts are paying off from the way she is chugging and not tasting at all.

“I like your art — on the walls,” he tells her, just for something to say.

“Thanks. They were expensive,” she says bluntly.

He maintains his politeness. “How do you like the neighborhood?”

She crinkles her nose in distaste. “The neighbors are nosy, and they keep trying to pet my dogs. So fucking annoying.”

“Oh, that’s a bummer. How are the dogs liking the new house?”

“They can’t talk, Grey,” she says, really casually and without any heat or condescension, really. “So I don’t know how they feel. But I assume they like it because they live really blessed lives with all of their needs taken care of. There’s a dog walker that comes in twice while I’m at work. Is it this high maintenance with kids? Did you have a babysitter popping in on you a lot when you were younger?”

He shakes his head. “I have no idea what’s normal these days. My brother and I were latchkey kids.”

“Oh cool,” she says. “My dad used to leave me and my brother alone for weeks at a time sometimes, when we were little. I don’t know what’s normal either.”

“Um, did your dad work a lot?”

“Yeah, he did. But he left us alone because he was schizophrenic and had a raging coke problem.”

“Oh.” He does not even fucking know what is appropriate to say in response to this. So he says, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she says easily — breezily. “When he was away, we didn’t have to worry about him going nuts and threatening us with knives or killing us in our sleep.” 

He really does not know what to say to  _ this.  _ “Oh, okay. Wow.”

He is thinking that an expression of pity or empathy is empty and stupid. He is thinking that this is why he is always silent when people tell him tragic things. He is thinking that he knows that it comes across as cold and uncaring. But he is also thinking that it’s wrong and disrespectful to pretend to shed tears over shit he did not experience. It minimizes other people’s pain.

So he reasons that the only way for him to respond to this secret-revealing is to reveal a secret of his own, of the same magnitude.

So he tells her, “I tried to kill myself in Valyria. I told myself it was because they knew so much about me and I was such a liability alive. I told myself it would be better for my parents and for you guys if I was just dead. And as I was planning it, there were all of these hours I spent sitting in the dark, thinking about how I was gonna do it. I thought about — right before Bolton — how Selmy had asked if I wanted to increase personnel because he was worried. And I actually  _ scoffed _ and told him, ‘Let’s not blow through the budget by overworking this.’ I was so confident and such an asshole. And people  _ died _ because of that. That was my fault.”  

This results in a thick pause as Dany carefully considers his words.

And then she says, “No, that was actually my fault,” swinging her wine glass back to her red mouth. “Barristan told me he really did not think we should engage at all. I refused to listen to him. I approved it. I made you all go in. To die.”

“You were doing your job the best that you could have,” he says — slowly — because it’s the first time he’s actually expressed this — to her or even to himself. 

“Really? You really think that?” Her voice is wistful — maybe a little hopeful.

“Yeah, I do,” he says.

“Hey, I’m  _ so sorry  _ for everything,” she says, sucking down another big gulp of wine so that she is too drunk to cry in front of another person — because she thinks crying is self-indulgent and selfish. The people who are dead should be crying. They deserve to cry. Not her. “I’m sorry for Valyria, too.”

“It’s okay,” he says.

“No, it’s not.”

“No, really. It is.”

So she adds, “For the record, you were also doing your job the best that you could have. You did everything right. You did everything by the book. You listened  _ to me  _ because you had to.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


An hour later, they are drunk and still trading secrets. She wants to know a bunch of sex stuff — and he’s uncomfortable by the interest. He manages to tell her that he was 22 the first time he had sex. He tells her he was not good at sex at 22. She tells him the first time she had sex was when a boy tricked her into giving him a blow job. 

This is information that Grey does  _ not _ want to know and he’s certainly not soliciting it at all — but Dany is on a roll.

She wants to know how he has sex ever since he lost his penis. He really does not want to talk about this with her, so he tells her it’s private and personal. She does not even care that he is prudish. She starts guessing. She guesses oral and anal. 

At that, he gets up and tells her he needs to go to the fucking bathroom to pee.

When he comes back out after washing his hands, he finds that she is teetering dangerous on her bare feet as she stumbles back to the kitchen and tries to open another bottle of wine — from her personal stash — with a knife.

He wobbles as he rushes over to her — to pull the knife out of her hand — as she tells him she was just going to cut the foil off, relax. But for real, she is actually really good at sabering champagne bottles.

This is how they end up with a bottle of champagne in her dark backyard, with a  _ big knife  _ that she is clenching in her fist. Her dogs are sleepily curious — but not intruding. They love the new house. They are much mellower here than cooped up in the apartment.

Dany is barefoot on her concrete patio, pulling at the flaps of her robe so that the chill doesn’t hit her too hard and ruin her concentration.

He thinks that she’s holding that knife in a really scary way and her wrist looks all dainty and weak.  

He says, “Daenerys —”

She says, “Don’t,” through clenched teeth. Because she hates it when men tell her what she can and cannot do.

And then she whacks the knife forward and slams the blade into the lip of the champagne bottle.

And then she screams —

He thinks she fucking cut herself like an idiot.

But then he realizes she is screaming in victory. She is holding the frothing bottle of champagne and her knife up high to the sky.

  
  
  
  
  
  


He secretly tells her that she’s secretly actually fun to be around. 

She punches him in the shoulder violently and yell-tells him that she is  _ totally _ secretly fun. But no one gets to know this because she’s their boss — or she used to be — and also, people are fucking boring and ordinary and they don’t think her brand of fun is actually fun. They just like to sit around talking about how nice everyone is, which is like — fucking stupid and boring. 

He nods gravely — because he hasn’t been this drunk in  _ a while. _

As she refills his glass, he asks her, “Do you think I should go on an antidepressant?”

She doesn’t even think about it before she says, “Oh, for sure. You’ll like it. I’m on one. It makes a huge difference. Like, I’d be really cranky and negative and depressed if I wasn’t on one.”

All he can say to that is, “Oh, okay. So  _ this _ is you _ medicated.” _

“Yep! Ever since my dad died from an overdose!”

“Oh my God, there are so many layers to you, Daenerys.”

“Thanks! You can call me Dany if you want. My one other friend calls me that. Oh my God, speaking of — should we call your number one fan and see what she’s up to? I’m hungry!”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He tells her no — and yes — call and don’t call Missandei and tell her to come over. He tells Dany no because his brain is panicking and he doesn’t think he should keep leading Missandei on and disrupting her life and also, he doesn’t think she should see him drunk? It might be repulsive and a turn off to her. 

He tells Dany yes because he really just fucking wants to see Missandei.  

Dany does not even care about his inner turmoil. She is already dialing.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei arrives with two really specific pizzas, because on the phone, Dany was slurring and saying stuff about fucking off her diet because she has nothing left to be beautiful for.

That translated into a pepperoni, chicken, and pineapple pizza, a combination pizza with white sauce and anchovies, and a two-liter bottle of clear-white soda. Dany didn’t name a flavor so much as she named a color. Missandei thought that was unnecessarily confusing.

Dany also forgot to tell tell Missy that she is hanging out with Grey, so Missandei shows up — once again — not looking very cute because she is trying to get her skin healthier because it’s not great to see developing worry lines on top of her chronic forehead zit issue. 

Missandei shows up in her pajamas and a sports bra that flattens her boobs into a mono-boob. Her glasses that are all taped up because last time she was here, Dany’s dogs chewed her glasses and she hasn’t taken the time to bring Dany’s money to the optometrist. 

So when she sees Grey standing behind Dany’s kitchen counter looking all stunned and handsome and normal, she blurts out, “Oh my God, what!  _ Why!” _ as she looks at Dany accusingly.

Grey takes the pizza boxes and the soda out of her hands. He says, “Sorry,” as he shifts his eyes around the room. He feels like this is a bizarre response to his presence. He also observes that he has been apologizing to the women in his life  _ a lot _ lately.  

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei sees the emptied bottles of wine and broken bottles of champagne piled high in a paper bag next to the garbage can. She figures out that her friends are pretty drunk and that they probably have a lot of fun with each other all the time, only when she is not around to join in. This is like the steak dinner all over again.

“We drank nearly half of a month’s mortgage,” Dany randomly brings up. Because she likes to talk about her money when she gets plastered.

“Oh my God, really?” Grey mutters, covering his face in shame. “Nooo.” 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missy realizes that she’s never seen him full-on drunk before. She’s only seen him with, at most, three glasses of wine in him. 

She learns that he is massively transparent in his self-consciousness and insecurities when he is drunk — he keeps asking if things are okay. If it’s okay for him to take a piece of pizza, if it’s okay for him to get plates, if it’s okay for him to pull out some napkins, if it’s okay for him to put ice in their soda glasses. He even asks if his constant questions are annoying to them.

He alternates that with these moments of pure unencumbered joy whenever Dany says something shitty and tragic — which happens a lot. Missandei learns that he is capable of laughing so hard that his face turns a little purple and he’s gasping to breathe. 

She watches intently, holding in her breath, as he gets up from the couch holding his refreshed glass of wine to show Dany how to properly throw a knife so that the blade actually sticks outward. 

Missandei grabs the nearest shield — a throw pillow from the couch — and covers her torso with it.

He sees her and drops the most open, heart-stopping smile ever. He shows teeth. His eyes crinkle. He has dimples. 

It slays her. 

As he lightly holds onto Dany’s wrist to make sure Dany doesn’t spastically and randomly throw the knife in her hand, he looks at Missandei and says to her, “Don’t worry. I wouldn’t let her accidentally hit you with a knife.”

“I’m not my dad, Missandei,” Dany says, with her voice low and her gaze full of concentration. She is looking at a blank wall. 

Are they seriously going to throw kitchen knives at the wall?

  
  
  
  
  
  


The longer the night wears on, the more she thinks that he is utterly charming like this — that he should be drunk all the time — because it’s completely disgusting how freaking perfect he is and how he keeps throwing this fact about himself in her face. 

He cuts up the pizza into mini slices, for instance, explaining to her that littler pieces are cuter-looking and easier to eat. She just stares at his profile in disbelief and  _ drinks it all up. _

She actually does a lot of nervous laughing and a lot of nervous smiling because it’s so bewildering.

He runs his hand down her arm before pinching her on the wrist as he wordlessly squeezes behind her on his way to the toilet for instance.   

For instance, he is laughing nonstop as he yells at her and does this bit with Dany. They both scream at her that they don’t know what she’s talking about — Dany is fun! Dany is not a blackhole that sucks up joy and light. Dany has jokes!

Missy is shaking her head in mortification, because she is falling for their taunting. She has to yell back at them, to be heard over their shouting. She has to tell them that Dany is her best friend and she  _ never _ said that Dany murders joy. Dany is really fun! She is the first person to tell people that Dany is really sweet and caring and kind and fun at her core.

“You don’t like how I’ve changed because it’s hard to come back from having the weight of people’s lives on your conscience!” Dany shouts. “You miss what I was like in college! You don’t take vacations with me anymore because you don’t think I’m fun!”

“Oh my God,” Missandei says, distraught now because she worries she has been hurtful to her friend. “Do you want to take a vacation together? I haven’t taken a vacation in years! It’s not you! It’s my schedule! Did you want to toss some dates and locations around? We can go somewhere together!”

And then Dany just bursts out laughing. Dany actually stifles her malicious delight by rolling her body right into Grey’s chest — because they are sitting next to each other on the couch. 

Missy sees him reach his hand up to cradle the back of Dany’s platinum head.

Missandei is shaking her head again. She is like, “What the hell?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


While Dany is in the bathroom peeing, he touches Missandei’s shoulder to get her attention and he tries to give her money for the food — which she refuses because it was nominal and she doesn’t want their relationship to be transactional, where they clock favors and try to keep it even so that they never owe one another anything. 

She pushes the bills away and says, “No, it’s totally fine. My treat.”

“No, come on,” he says, as he tries to find a spot to shove his money. She didn’t come with a purse. “Take my cash,” he says. “It’ll make me feel better about putting you out.” 

“You didn’t put me out.”

And then she pretty much jumps in surprise when he sneaks his hand into a pocket of her pajama pants and slides the money in there. 

“Sorry,” he says, going self-conscious and insecure again. He starts to retract his hand, pulling the money with him. “I shouldn’t have done that. That wasn’t cool.” And when he realizes that he is still holding onto his money, he actually second-thinks everything and dips back into her pants pocket with his hand to drop the wad of cash back into it, muttering, “Christ, I’m an idiot. Sorry. Last time, I promise.”

As she recovers, as she gets used to his proximity, she grabs onto him with both of her hands. She grabs onto his shirt and laughs a little bit. She says, “This is one of my favorite versions of you.”

“The stupid, drunk version?” he asks quizzically, unconsciously leaning into her touch.

“No, the casually sexually charged one,” she explains, running her hands up his warm chest. “The one that makes mundane things sound sexy.”

“I’m really not doing it on purpose,” he says, scanning his eyes over her face — her really bare and makeup-less face. “It’s your perverted brain that is twisting stuff around,” he says quietly, as he reaches up to briefly cup her cheek before he — seriously — runs the pad of his thumb over her forehead zit.

In response to that, she immediately says, “Ah, Grey! What are you  _ doing!” _

“Looking at your face,” he says calmly. “It’s okay.” And then after a beat, he winds his arm around her waist, pulls her closer so that he can see her forehead better, and then he murmurs, “Have you been stressed out lately? Is that why you are breaking out a little?”

She thinks this is completely fucking mortifying and also  _ hot as hell. _ She is so embarrassed and thrilled. It’s a weird mix.

And when the toilet flushes and Dany walks outs, Missandei immediately shoves him backwards and off of her. He lightly careens into the wall — her face goes to  _ fire  _ at the thump.

And he looks shocked before he relaxes and slowly starts to laugh — deep and thick — a sound that comes from the belly. 

  
  
  


 


	72. Grey and Missy go to Duskendale!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Missy explores future career prospects because she cannot do pretend sex work forever. Grey chugs along in his healing — he thinks it's going nowhere, but the rest of us know that he's actually going somewhere and he needs to have a more optimistic attitude about it. Then, Missy and the love of her life go on a road trip (for work)! It's not one of those sexy work trips that you see on TV. It's just a regular work trip where Grey tries to ply children with candy.

  
  
  
  
  


When Missandei walks over to Dany’s new fourth floor office on Monday with their lunch salads — when Missy sees a really sober Dany wearing pants instead of a dress or skirt — when she sees Dany’s hair in a ponytail — well, Missandei realizes that she certainly has a type. She is a bright and cheery person who is attracted to personalities who are _the most_ about their own self-loathing. 

“Cool outfit,” she tells Dany, setting their salads down. “That’s a look.”

“I bought this shirt at Target,” Dany says bitterly. “It’s a polyester blend.”

“I . . . shop at Target all the time,” Missandei says, with the corner of her mouth twitching. “But I get that you think you are really in dire straits, Dany.”

They are talking a lot more consistently now, so the number of updates they can give one another is nominal. Dany can only gripe about her dogs so much, even though she secretly loves them very much. Dany can only complain about how much she hates her job so much. Missy can only gossip about her Dad’s relationship with Bettie so much. She can only talk about how annoying her boss and her job is sometimes so much. She can only talk about how she’s never going to get laid ever again so much. 

Even then, acting as if it’s a non sequitur and not something that gets brought up a lot, Dany points her fork at Missandei and — acting like she is about to be revelatory — she says, “Do you wanna know what I think about you and Grey?”

Missy is shaking her head. She is saying no. She really does not want to know what Dany thinks about her and Grey. She already can anticipate that Dany will tell her she’s an idiot again because that’s been the party line for a while with everyone.

Dany does not internalize the very obvious rejection of her opinion — she never does. Dany just presses forward because she thinks Missandei needs to hear this.

She says, “I realized I have never actually seen you guys together. And now I have. And I get it now. He completely loves you.”

Missandei’s face immediately flushes in embarrassment and also in pained disbelief and denial. She says, “What? No, he doesn’t. _No way._ He’s just a flirt! He might be fond of me, and he probably wants to tap this ass again — but ah, love? No! _What?_ No! That’s a strong word.”

Dany is so amused and smiling so hard. She says, “Aw, where is my overconfident girl? Where did she go?”

“I don’t know! She took a hike!” Missandei says, still embarrassed.

“You should try to make it work,” Dany says, as if Missandei has never thought of _trying to make it work_ ever before. “You guys are good for each other. I think it’s hard for him to put himself out there because he’s still really traumatized by the violence on his body and the imprisonment by white supremacists and the constant denial of his personhood in his career. It’s hard to get over that terribleness, you know?”

“Gee, you think?” Missy says, with more than a touch of sarcasm.

“Yeah, I really do, Missandei,” Dany says serenely, apparently deaf to sarcasm. “Trust me. I don’t have an honest and healthy relationship with anyone at all because it feels impossible to. Well, I do have _you._ But that’s it, really. I like him, by the way! He’s very pleasant to be around. Who knew!”

“I mean, I did?” Missandei offers. “I mean, that’s what I’ve been saying to you?”

Dany blows that off. “Did you know that he was like, a child prodigy? In the Summer Isles, though. So his potential was always limited by that. That’s unfortunate.”

“Yeah, I _did_ know that,” Missy says. “And that sounds kind of racist-y, Dany?”

“I meant that the education system there is poor, and there were no systems in place like we have here in Westeros to really help him thrive,” Dany clarifies.

Missy is shaking her head because she doesn’t think Dany is making this sound better at all.

“Missandei, I am Valyrian. What do you expect?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missandei buys Gilly Tarly a cup of coffee in order to make good on her offer of trading caffeine and company for insight and information. She also offers Gilly a donut or a bagel to sweeten the deal, but Gilly politely declines and said just the coffee is fine.

When they are settled with their drinks and sitting at a table, Missandei shyly tells Gilly that her husband, Dr. Tarly, seems really great — they’ve traveled on the road together a few times and have crossed paths more than a few other times in the course of work. 

This is a compliment that Gilly Tarly hums over. She agrees that her husband is, indeed, great. 

It was not altogether an unpleasant surprise to learn about the relation. How it was explained to Missandei was that Gilly and Dr. Tarly met and started dating in college. Sam pursued his doctorate and Gilly stopped after her masters because she had less of a fear of entering a competitive workforce and maybe less of a passion for psychology.

“Are you . . . married also?” Gilly asks. And they both glance down at Missandei’s bare left hand at the same time. Gilly explains, “Many people nowadays opt not to wear rings.”

Missandei shakes her head. “No, I’m not married.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Missy has this interest in recidivism rates with sex workers who engage in social services that support them transitioning out of sex work. She’s interested in the conditions that deter recidivism and also the traits that might make certain women more inclined or more disinclined toward recidivism. She is interested in how much of the so-called “conventional” wisdom she has accumulated is flawed and how they might better classify sex workers and codify their work in order to support women in rehabilitation as well as do her own work better.

“But I suppose even the word rehabilitation has this inherent moral judgment hardcoded into terminology,” she says.

“Certainly some women don’t view sex work as disempowering or degrading,” Gilly offers. “Many do feel that sex work is empowering — in that it provides for families and allows women to be entrepreneurial.”

“It’s hard for me to buy into that due to my own experiences in my career,” Missandei says, careful to not go into much detail. “It’s hard for me not to see it as always exploitative, in its various forms.”

“Yes, well, now the question is — do you have research to support your first-hand observations? My guess is not yet. From what I understand from Sam, prudent process changes tend to be move glacially at the organization.”

“Yes, they do,” Missandei affirms.

“Well, you’ll eventually have to figure out and decide whether or not an advanced degree is really what you want to pursue to get a job that may not end up being completely suited to you. It’s a risk we all take.”

“You gave up your private practice — to work at the women’s safety center?” Missy asks this shyly, even though she knows that this is true. She remembers it from Gilly’s talk.

“I did,” Gilly says, nodding. 

Missy also remembers Gilly transparently speaking about how childhood sexual abuse and healing from that trauma head-on after years of starts and stops and self-harm was a prime motivator behind her decision to change her career. Missandei remembers being so awestruck by Gilly’s complete ease in showcasing her own vulnerability to a room full of strangers. 

Missy also remembers Gilly talking about how they all carry the past forward with them, but the past doesn’t have to necessarily dictate the future. It wasn’t so much the content of the statement that struck Missy — because she’s heard various forms of that statement from many people — it was more the delivery of it. Gilly said it like everyone has access to health and happiness. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey tells Sam that his antidepressant is going great — he doesn’t feel different at all! He feels completely the same!  

Over the course of the last month’s sessions, they have been letting Sam direct and steer more of the therapy rather than let Grey dictate the trajectory of therapy based on his worries or complaints of the day. Basically, they have both decided to let Sam do his freaking job. Grey is to take more of a backseat — Sam is to drive it more.

Thus far, Grey finds Sam’s new method somewhat meandering — sometimes he’s not sure that Sam isn’t just making up this shit on the spot — and Grey also finds Sam’s focuses to be pretty uncomfortable. 

Sam keeps wanting to talk about Bolton for instance.

Grey does not want to talk about Bolton at all. He’s already said everything about that. He gets the point of exposure therapy. He’s read about it. He understands the goal of it. It’s not that he doesn’t think he could benefit. It’s more that he doesn’t think the return investment on it is enough.

Today, he deflects a little bit by saying, “I know I have PTSD, but I sometimes don’t think I have PTSD?”

Sam still indulges Grey in his distraction techniques sometimes — because Grey is naturally very leader-y. And Sam is typically naturally intimidated by people with the kind of leadership-confidence that Grey has. 

Sam fills in the blanks. He says, “Because you don’t experience flashbacks or get triggered by memories of what happened.”

“Exactly,” Grey says. 

“You just disassociate from other people, pathologically avoid intimacy, and consistently exhibit negative cognitions and moods,” Sam supplies.

“Okay, so did they teach you sarcasm in medical school?” Grey asks.

“I did not go to medical school,” Sam says.

“I know,” Grey says — now grinning.

“You’re being an asshole.”

“Did they teach you to call me names at not-medical school?”

“Grey, if you don’t want to talk about this right now, just say so,” Sam says bluntly. He’s trying to be more direct. “You don’t have to do this right now. It’s really up to you, how far you want to push yourself today.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They make the four-hour drive to Duskendale to talk to a homicide detective, talk to the organization’s team on the ground there, and conduct interviews with the port authorities as well as take a drive through some hotspots to see if there is anything of interest. While King’s Landing is the most concentrated hotbed of human trafficking in Westeros due to its many ports, its international trade economy, and the rural areas directly outside of the city borders that are agriculture dependent, which drives up demand for unskilled labor — Duskendale cannot be overlooked due to its mirror traits. 

Selmy is sending them there to take a look because a string of homicides — three underaged prostitutes — put it on his radar. 

Grey is having her drive them there, which is pretty cool because he never has her drive them on the job. 

When he picks her up, he makes himself smile at her dad and ask her dad if Missandei is a good driver. 

Her dad pretends to think about it, before telling Grey that she is a rather mediocre driver.

In the car, Grey tells her he’s trying something new — he’s trying to relax more and be less of a control freak about every fucking thing, so yeah, she can cart his ass around while he tries to catch a nap.

It’s a joke. He is actually awake and alert the entire time. He is side-seat driving the entire time, telling her to turn on the blinkers earlier and to double check side mirrors before merging. 

She is like, “Hey, when do you start _relaxing?”_

  
  
  
  
  
  


After they shake hands and Grey makes all of the requisite jokes about the basement office still keeping Dolorous pale as shit — Missy figures out that the two of them must have worked together in the past based on the way they interact — Dolorous takes them into a conference room to let them go through stacks and stacks of digital transcripts that his team has compiled through interviews that his officers have conducted with sex workers and, in some cases, their pimps.

“How did you source the contacts?” Grey asks.

“Social media and escort sites,” Dolorous says. “We looked at sites advertising for commercial sex with coded language for juveniles. We then set up fake dates with our undercover officers, met the contacts, and then brought them in for questioning.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


He buys her a sandwich from a cafe during lunch, kind of harshly telling her to put her fucking wallet away because he’s going to put it on the company card. 

And then he shakes his head, softens his tone, and says, “Sorry. I was stuck in work mode. I didn’t mean to be so hard with you right then.”

She smiles at him as she cups her water glass with both hands. She ordered a straightforward turkey sandwich. He got a roast beef after telling her he can eat mayonnaise and mustard again now. 

She says to him, “That’s how you and Drogo talked to each other when you two worked together, huh? It’s different with me, right?”

“Yeah,” he admits. “Not because you’re a woman,” he says quickly, trying to guess what she’s thinking. “I talk to a lot of women like that, too — Arya, Yara, Kojja, Yaya —”

“Everyone except me?”

“Well, you and Pia.”

“Me and Pia!” she exclaims, giggling now. “Oh, so in your mind, I’m on the same plane as Pia?”

“Hey, Pia’s not that bad,” he says, chuckling, too.

They eat their sandwiches leisurely while they talk a lot of shop. They talk about how 60 new investigations opened up after the Baelish raid and how this latest series of raids is going to result in more open cases. They talk about how they need to be better staffed. He gives her some insight on why they are not better staffed, having gained that insight in his former job. He explains this convoluted budgeting system to her that is bloated by a bureaucracy that tends to rely on third party consultants to make recommendations before any increases. 

He swipes mayo off of the corner of his mouth with a crumpled napkin as he says, “Do you feel like driving this afternoon, too?”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They change their clothes before they go out again — stripping off their suits and his tie, putting on jeans, t-shirts, and jackets. Grey pulls out a fat bag of candy bars that he purchased the night before and pops it down at his feet, which makes her dryly comment that his creeper quotient is currently off the charts. 

That makes him smile, mostly to himself, as he mutters, “You like it,” before he adjust the baseball cap on his head and checks his firearm underneath his jacket.

  
  
  
  
  
  


Grey tries to bribe some 12-year-old boys playing at a park by themselves with candy in exchange for a chat. All the boys are Black. They are here because it fits the profile of the communities that the murder victims come from. 

One of the boys — the leader — looks at Grey with _such suspicion_ and shouts, “Are you a cop or a pedophile!”

Grey stops walking at that. And then he actually says, “Cop,” because he’s currently _very_ impressed.

“Let us see your badge!” a tall and athletic boy in a blue jacket demands. 

“Who’s the Lexxy at your car?” another boy asks.

Grey swivels his head around to make eye contact with Missandei, who can hear their entire conversation. He gestures for her to walk on over, before he turns back to the boys and pulls his wallet out of his back pocket with his left hand. He always keeps his right hand free and close to his gun. He shows them his government issued ID.

“That’s not a badge, Mister!” 

“We’re federal, kiddo,” Missandei says, as she reaches them. 

“Hey, _mama._ How are you doin’?”

“I’m doing good, honey.”

The rest of the group erupts in laughter and giggles as they start shoving and joshing the boy who is trying to hit on Missandei. 

Grey is grinning. He has also re-pocketed his wallet and is back to holding up a lot of candy bars. “Can we have a chat now?” he asks them.

“Mister, we ain’t six years old. We don’t want your candy.”

“Uhhh, I want his candy.”

“Can we have a chat with _her_ instead of _you?”_

  
  
  
  
  
  


When they get back to their car after talking with the boys for fifteen minutes, after they learn that the boys are all hyper-aware and not at all blind to the environment they live in, after the boys spilled some interesting tidbits about their immigrant grandparents and parents, after Grey jots down some quick notes on his laptop as Missandei starts the car — he mutters, “Those little motherfuckers were hilarious — and very cute.”

“They were super cute,” Missandei says, readily agreeing. “And they must be taking cues from the adults in their lives — did you notice the posturing and the vocabulary?”

“Yeah, especially the one in blue. He really liked you.”

“Yeah?” she says, swiveling her head to look at him before she starts driving. She’s smiling at him. “Do you think he’s single? Are you jealous?”

Grey makes a face at her. “Missandei, he’s a twelve-year-old child. Don’t be gross.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


In the hotel bar, during dinner because they decide to eat dinner at the bar because, according to her, the menu looks “aiight” — she asks him if he’d like a drink, too, because she’s grabbing a beer. 

He shakes his head, kind of grimacing. She already knows he doesn’t like to drink when he’s working. There’s a lot of stuff that he refuses to do when he’s working. It’s actually a minor miracle she convinced him to come down and have dinner with her, versus staying holed up in his room the entire night with room service and his computer. 

He tells her, “I’m still recovering from last week.”

She laughs quietly.

“Daenerys is rowdy,” he says, flipping over the menu. “My liver is still sore about it.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


Dinner with him at the bar counter during their off-hours is not at all a date — for one, they are talking _a lot_ about murder rates, rape and sexual assault statistics, legal due process, and also how annoying he thinks their PR system is and how it’s an expensive and ineffective tool.  

Even though it doesn’t feel like a date, she still completely enjoys being around him and spending time with him. She finds that it’s a relief to have someone in her life that she can talk to — _really talk to —_ about the intricacies and complexity of her job. It’s a relief to talk to someone who understands because he lives a similar life. It’s a relief that she doesn’t have to watch what she says because he has higher security clearance than she does. 

A little bit of the personal sneaks in when — after finishing his “okay” pork chop — he grazes his elbow with hers when he catches her watching a commercial for RVs on the TV screen. He says, “I’m thinking about going home and surprising my family next weekend. Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“Surprising your family with a visit?” she asks. “That sounds like a great idea.”

“I mean not telling them I’m coming,” he clarifies. “I don’t want to give them a heads up and let my mom stress herself out because she starts to cram in a lot of cooking and cleaning to prepare for me for a whopping two days.”

“Won’t she be stressed out if you just show up and she feels like she has to rearrange her weekend to accommodate you?”

“That’s a good point.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


They don’t have to stay in the same room together because they are not undercover. Separate rooms were booked for them — which is why she starts to drag her feet after dinner because their downtime is coming to an end. 

On their way up to the seventh floor, he asks her what her plans for the rest of the night. She tells him that she might take a bath in a really clean hotel bathtub and maybe watch a little bit of TV before bed. She returns the favor and asks him what he’s going to be doing for the rest of the night.

“Probably get a leg up on reports,” he tells her.

“Oh, duh,” she says, grinning at him. “Of course.”

He gives her a genuine smile before they part ways, where the hallway forks and she has to go right as he goes left. He also gives her a quick pat on the shoulder and tells her, “Good night, Missandei.”

It’s one of those moments where she feels like her emotions are just bleeding out of her hot face — that stuff that her superiors are always trying to train out of her. She responds to his smile with tension on her face — because she just keeps thinking about how she just wants to _be with him_ and how it hurts like this sometimes because she _can’t_ be with him.

He knows her well — he reads her face well — so he can at least see that she is unhappy — about them.

So he hugs her.

He reasons that he can at least give _this._

He reaches out to grasp her waist with his hands as she immediately raises her arms to encircle them around the back of his neck and shoulders. He is also thinking that this situation really fucking _sucks_ for him, too. He keeps waiting for and dreading the moment that she gives up on him and moves on. He also feels like he should be better about encouraging her disconnect from him. So it’s counterintuitive that he is holding onto her so tightly.

“How’s therapy going?” she asks, her voice muffled against him. “How’s the antidepressant working?”

“It’s okay,” he mutters, because that’s more hopeful to say than how it actually really feels. It feels stagnant and like he is making no gains whatsoever.

“God, you smell _so good.”_

“It’s the soap I don’t use. I don’t know how else to explain it, man.”

  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
